Why violent crime is plummeting in the rich world ?

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"VIOLENT crime is on the retreat in most advanced economies. The latest US figures, for 2013, show that murder rates are lower now than in the early 1960s. In the same year, homicides in Japan hit a post-war low. In England and Wales the level of violence has dropped by 66 per cent since the latest peak in 1995.

In fact, big falls in homicides have happened in virtually all developed societies over the past 20 years. In the US, it is clear that the decline in violence extends to robbery, assault, rape, child maltreatment, domestic abuse and school bullying.

Why crime rose sharply in the second half of the 20th century before falling dramatically is open to debate. The causes are complex, and we are only starting to unravel them. It is also clear that in some nations homicide rates remain stubbornly high."

Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg ... z6sqLPqqSk

More info :

https://scholarship.law.umn.edu/faculty_articles/511/

https://theconversation.com/homicide-is ... why-125365

"Social scientists are not certain of the causes of this overall decline.

Policymakers, scientists and law enforcement officials have proposed several explanations for the dramatic reductions in crime during this period, including increased incarceration, receding drug markets, innovations in policing, improvements in the economy, increased immigration and the legalization of abortion.

Most of these explanations link the violence reduction to domestic policies of individual countries. Of course, this type of research is challenging, as many countries do not collect reliable data on key variables. For example, long-term data on gun ownership, drug use, the influence of organized crime and the efficacy of courts and policing institutions are not available for most countries.

[...]

Our models suggest to us that age plays a large role in this pattern. Age was the only factor we looked at that consistently predicted homicide increases and declines over an extended period of time."

As wealthy people get older, they acquire more money.

More money buys better weed.

Better weed means less violence.

Likely, the category of *young males* is slightly less % of the population.

The Freakonomics podcast suggested legization of/access to abortion as possible reason.

There's usually reasons for abortions, and reasons not to want children at certain times, for example if the mother knows she can't raise the kid adequately.
The economists suggest that children of low income single mothers have an above average chance of becoming violent criminals, so by reducing the number of these children, you effectively reduce the number of violent criminals, thus reducing the number of violent crimes.

It's a correlation, they admit, and a thesis that agrees with the data, but ultimately it's speculation.

I live in Wales. Since 1995 there have been changes to how crimes have been reported which mean that many crimes that have been reported are no longer officially registered like they once were, and we are no longer allowed to call the police out to attend things like road traffic accidents like we once were.

Mountain Goat is on the right track. First you have to decide whether you can trust the statistics, especially in the UK. Violent crime is a politically important statistic - so you can be assured that those numbers are massaged to one degree or another. Especially since the Blair government.

I really wonder how much of it can be attributed to Nintendo, XBox, Playstation, poor people having access to big screen TV's, now internet and all sorts of streaming, it's a bit like there are other 'sumps' or ways to drain off pent up energy aside from going out and tangling. Those options clearly don't fix everything but they give a different 'path of least resistance'.

Demographics is a big part of it.

Industrialized nations have had a steady decline in birth rate since 1970.

So by the 1990s there was a smaller percentage of young males in the population. That alone means less violence.

That time span coincides with the rise of the internet. The Net may have some effect. You can stay at home and troll instead of go out commit vandalism and mugging. Lets off steam.

Older wealthy people don’t commit crimes, they hire poor young people to commit them.