Listeners, Let Me Introduce You to Crime in America

Can we use math to determine who is most likely to make you a homicide victim? How has criminal behavior changed in the past 70 years? How long does a robber take before deciding to rob someone? Take a quick listen and let me answer these questions in this short, 20 minute episode. I deliver no less than two facts about crime and incarceration per minute that you can take to the bank or your next family gathering to make life interesting.


Episode Sources:

Vera Institute of Justice
https://www.fbi.gov/services/cjis/ucr/publications
https://www.fairfightinitiative.org/the-history-causes-and-facts-on-mass-incarceration/
Lecture notes from Dr. Saundra Westervelt

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Z-files! I am Professor Z, your dedicated host. This podcast will explore the field of criminology, an area that fascinated me so much I completed my Masters degree in it and  I am now on my fourth year as a professor of the subject. Officially, I am an criminologist, making me someone who studies crime, criminals, and criminal behavior.  Now a word of caution, if you are looking for a documentary about serial killers or a spooky ghost story to increase your daily amount of anxiety, you might want to find another podcast. Say goodbye to the fear mongering of social media and news outlets, and the viral crime avoidance tips on TikTok and say hello to your new expertise in the field of criminology. Let’s begin. 

 Today’s episode is called “Listeners, let me introduce you to crime in America.” If you plan to listen in a public space, just know that I would rate this episodes content as PG-13 for certain topics, never for language. 

Lets go back a bit to understand how history has shaped crime and incarceration up to this point.  Now, We do have homicide data that dates back to the 1600s, but its incomplete. I say this because the record keeping was selective. For example, not every person who was murdered received recognistion in these homicide files. Over 4,000 victims of racially motivated lynching between 1877 and 1950 were never recorded as homicide victims. So I can’t with any integrity rely on that database when it so obviously ignored murders of people based on race. Therefore, the earliest I can take you back is the 1930s, when law enforcement began to use more reliable methods to record crime data. World events had an immediate effect on recorded crime rates as a large number of men entered military service towards the end of the 1930s and beginning of the 1940s. As more men entered the military service, criminal offending went down. Spoiler alert, in nearly every decade data reflects that typically, most criminal offenders are men. From 1933-1942, the crime index dropped from 770 to 580 offenses per every 100,000 members of population in the US. After the war, veterans returned, the nuclear family became popular, and society experienced a few important changes. Birth rates between 1945-1955 dramatically increased. I’ll share a very simple crime equation for you,You can rely on the fact  that more people = more crime opportunity. Besides the population boost, more women were in the work force which decreased adult supervision at home in comparison to previous days. ADult supervision and juvenile delinquency has always been inversely related. When something causes adult supervision to be lower in a society, juvenile offending will rise. anyways, As the baby boomers reached the crime prone years of their early 20s, crime rates increased dramatically. The 1960s were a tumultuous time mostly due to the baby boomers entering the crime prone age. **SirensIn addition, more crimes were being reported than before as new technology and standardized data collection procedures were established. Social norms began to blurr, the Vietnam War, Civil Rights Movement, and divorce rate contributed to societal upheaval which all increased the crime rate. Even as baby boomers aged out of crime, the more mainstream use of drugs led to a rise in violent crime. The 1980s ushered in a dark period of American criminal justice. Various presidents declared war on different aspects of society including poverty, crime, and drug use. All declarations of war were followed with attacks on social programs. The most boastful democracy in the world decided tough on crime and liberal with prison sentences would be the best solution to these problems.  From the 1970s, the American criminal justice system established a firm, incarcerate now, ask questions later mentality towards any suspected criminal activity. By 1981, 60% of state prisoners and 70% of prisoners in jail were forced to share their cells due to serious overcrowding and the deregulation of health and safety standards. But concerns about humane treatment of people didn’t stop anyone making policy decisions. By 1985, the state and federal prison population grew by 68%, an unprecedented rate. Most of these wars waged by the presidents  and their administrations only fueled whatever problem they wanted to remove and crime rates surged until their peak in the 1990s. 

Those policy decisions made by presidents 30 to 40 years ago have had lasting effects on our society. In just 40 years, the US incarceration rate has grown 500%. And yet, since the mid 90s, crime rates have been steadily decreasing. The exorbitant amount of people in prison combined with shrinking crime rates is deceiving because the two are not related. The case is not that we have successfully locked up everyone responsible for crime. In fact, incarceration does little to deter the general population from breaking the law. Research has found that for every 10% increase in incarceration rates, crime was only reduced by 2-4% between 1980 and 2000. US population represents 4.2% of the entire World’s population, but the US is responsible for 20% of the World’s prisoners. While the US does not have the highest crime rate in the world, it does incarcerate  more people than any other country in the world. Even if we only took the incarceration rates from each state in America, 37 of the states have a higher incarceration rate by themselves than Cuba, Rwanda, and the Russian Federation. 

In the past decade, the country's homicide rate was the lowest it had been since the 1960s, but nobody would know this from watching the news or the prison rates. Scholars have found that negative information attracts more attention, so if media outlets want to gain more viewers they need more negative information or things that will scare us. Dramatically portraying key violent crimes and reporting crime information in a misleading way paints the picture of an out of control society, when in fact crime in many of our categories has been steadily moving down.  ** Sound bytes of news reports about crime

Now I rely heavily on irrefutable data to construct my knowledge of crime. My data sources include the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, and Self-Report Studies. The Unifrom Crime Report or UCr is compiled every year from police departments around the country. Self-Report studies come from other places such as the National Crime Victimization Survey. Unfortunately, these two engines of data collection cannot gather information about every crime committed in the United States. First, not every crime is reported. You can probably think of a few crimes against yourself that you have personally decided not to report to the police, or you can think of a few crimes you have committed that were not reported to the police. Second of all, not every crime brought to the attention of the police receives a report. Third, not every police department in the US participates in this data sharing.  However, we will take as much information as we can from the UCR. 

The celebrity crimes on the UCR are 8 categories of crimes known as Index crimes. These crimes are split into two general categories, violent and property. The actions in this list include the most common street level crimes committed in the USA each year. Important note here, these are street level, not white collar crimes. What’s the difference? White collar crime denotes the violation of the law committed by a person or group of persons in the course of an otherwise respected and legitimate occupation or financial activity. Thus, its a crime that happens as the result of an opportunity to power or money. Street level crimes are talking about the violations that anyone can commit with or without access to power. Consequently, these are the crimes most forms of media would have us focus on even though they do not pose the greatest threat to society, but we will dive into that during the white collar crime episode. 

Back to the index crimes. Starting on the violent side, these include bodily injury or threat of injury. The big 4 are homicide, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. Property crimes include Larceny-Theft, Burglary, Motor-Vehicle Theft, and Arson. I want to ask which type of crime do you think is the most common in the United States every year? Violent or Property? Do I have good news for you, its property crimes. Now if I only talk about property crimes in the first episode I probably wont have repeat listeners for the rest of my podcast releases. For that reason I will take us to the big 4 violent crimes. We will follow the order from least frequent to most frequent. The first on our list is homicide. Compared to the other 7 index crimes, homicide makes up 0.14% of reported crime in the United States. Picture a dollar with me, the dollar represents total reported crime in the Untied States, now divide it into pennies, now divide one of those pennies into 10 slices. The amount of homicide in America is just over one pie slice of that penny. We don’t have murderers lurking around every corner. Now if I was a reporter trying to scare my audience, I would frame that same data point differently and just tell you the raw number of 16,425 homicides in 2019. Be wary if facts are presented to you as a raw number without context. 16,425 murders is a lot, but if we compare that to a population of over 300 million, it breaks down to 5 homicides per every 100,000 people.  I’m going to camp on homicide for a few minutes here. The FBI studied relationships between homicide victims and their killers, along with the circumstances for the reason of the homicide. Out of 144,238 known relationships of the people involved in a homicide, only 11% of people were killed by a stranger. Everyone else was killed by someone they knew, were friends with, were in love with, or someone they were related to. From those statistics we can safely conclude that a person is more likely to be killed by someone who knows them or loves them right now, rather than a stranger. Now should we still teach kids stranger danger, yes definitely. Alright so why do we have so many people killing their loved ones or friends? That question can be answered by looking at the circumstances of the homicide. The FBI was able to put together these circumstances for just over 90,000 homicides between the years of 2010 and 2020. 5% of these murders were due to juvenile gang activity, another 5% were due to narcotic motivated killings, while a whopping 38% were due to an argument. What the numbers are telling us here is that as a nation, our homicide rate is predominately fueled by poor communication skills. If these conversations could be resolved with better communication strategies, they wouldn’t have escalated into a homicide inducing argument between loved ones. Do we have a solution? Counseling, Therapy, praying, taking deep breaths, whatever it takes for you to remove your anger from a conversation and peacefully seek a solution. Alright, I have loads I could say about homicide but I need to finish the rest of the index crimes and you have my promise to dedicate an entire episode in the future to homicide by itself. If you wanted to hear more about Serial Killers, sorry not sorry, their activity only represents less than one percent of all crime in the history of the united states so I just don’t want to waste time explaining the motives of a crime that thankfully is not very common

Let’s quickly finish the last 3 on our list of violent index crimes. Rape is next, but I am only going to define it today, I really won’t share a lot about this crime because I want to make sure all my listeners are properly prepared for that subject. One thing I would like to point out is that thanks to the work of many feminists, the FBI changed the definition of rape in 2013, thus opening up the possiblity of recording more reports of sexual assault. Previously, the definition was  the carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will  .You will see in the UCR crime statistics this is recorded as the legacy definition. This definition of rape is problematic. It accounts for only one method of sexually assaulting someone, and it only accounts for one group of people to be assaulted. Rape is committed against men and women, with more than just carnal knowledge. It is also problematic because the courts struggled heavily with defining force.  The revised defintion states that rape is Penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim. Along with their revised definition, the FBI also provides scenarios of different assaults and which ones they consider to be rape. This is America’s most underreported crime. The reported percentage of rape on the UCR is 0.8% compared to the other index crimes. From self-report studies like the National Crime Victimization Survey, scholars estimate that only 12-14% of sexal assault in any form is reported to the authorities. 

Number 3 on our list is robbery. Robbery makes up 2% of the index crimes. Now here we enter one of my pet peeves, and that is when someone mixes up the term robbery and burglary. Robbery is The taking or attempting to take anything of value from the care, custody, or control of a person or persons by force or threat of force or violence and/or by putting the victim in fear. An unoccupied house cannot be “robbed” because no human was injured or threatened while something was taken from them. If someone breaks into your house, stumbles upon you watching TV in the living room, and then bolts, this was not a robbery. If someone breaks in, finds you, and threatens you with a weapon or the force of their body in order to take something from your house, then yes it was a robbery. Most robberies happen outside of homes on the street. Career criminals who rob people take 7 seconds to size up a person before deciding whether or not they are a good target. In the episode dedicated to robbery I will of course share all that I  know for how to make yourself an unappealing target for robbery. 

And last out of our big 4, we have aggravated assault. An unlawful attack by one person upon another for the purpose of inflicting severe or aggravated bodily injury. This type of assault usually is accompanied by the use of a weapon or by means likely to produce death or great bodily harm. Simple assaults are excluded. This question comes up a lot in class. What is the difference between simple and aggravated assault? Well every police officer, judge, lawyer, and jury will define that differently. My rule of thumb is that typically, aggravated assault will result in injuries that require medical attention, whereas simple assault will result in injuries that can be addressed at home. Aggravated assault makes up 7% of the index crimes. 

If we add all the violent index crimes together, they make up approximately 8.5% of all index crime. 

We are quickly coming up on 20 minutes so I will stop us there for today. On the next episode, we will go over property crimes and talk about regional, state, and city level crime offending. Thanks for joining me today! If you would like a list of my sources, please check out the description box with this podcast. 

https://www.fairfightinitiative.org/the-history-causes-and-facts-on-mass-incarceration/

FBI.gov

Vera Institute of Justice