What Explains Uptick In Violent Crime?
After 2014, violent crime reversed its previous downward trend and began to increase. This national trend was highlighted by events in Baltimore, Chicago, and St. Louis. Only by dramatically reversing this trend can we begin to revitalize crime-ridden neighborhoods, especially those in which poor black families are concentrated.
Unfortunately, there is no consensus explanation for violent crime rates. For example, Darrell Steffensmier et al found that even after adjusting for poverty and unemployment, black neighborhoods had substantially higher violent crime rates than similar white neighborhoods. However, Patrick Sharkey and Robert Sampson found that low-poverty white neighborhoods are overwhelmingly surrounded by other low-poverty white neighborhoods. In contrast, black neighborhoods with relatively low poverty levels are almost always surrounded by black neighborhoods that have high levels of poverty. As black youths mingle across these boundaries, invariably some of the violent crime spills over into the low poverty neighborhood. Thus, it is not clear that it is possible to disentangle race and poverty.
There is also no consensus on the potential link between employment and violent crime. Studies often use different measures: unemployment or employment rates; all men or only those from a certain age group. Indeed, it may be that specific groups among the jobless may be more risk prone to violent behavior than others. In particular, one study found that property crime was more pronounced only among a cohort of unemployed men: those who had no reasonable explanation for their joblessness. Thus, it could be important to focus on a particular subsection of jobless young men whose behaviors might not be captured in more aggregated employment measures.
I developed a model to explain the variation in state-level violent crime rates. It would have been ideal to use urban data, but racial measures are difficult to obtain on an annual basis because of small samples. Instead, I used state-level data for 2010 through 2016. Even at the state level, small sample size precluded the Department of Labor from publishing estimates of the black male population in a number of states. State-level explanatory variables included the black share of all men not in prison, poverty rate, male employment rate, high school graduation rate, and the share of disconnected men, 16 to 24 years old: those who were neither at work nor in school. Results varied, depending upon which variables were included. Once the disconnected youth variable is added, it is strongly statistically significant but now neither the poverty nor high school completion variables are significant. In particular, for every 10 percent increase in the disconnected rate, this comprehensive model predicts a 6.59 percent increase in the state’s violent crime rate. The black share of men is strongly statistically significant indicating that even after taking into account employment, education, and poverty, states with a greater black share have higher violent crime rates.
These results indicate violent crime rates are influenced by a combination of disadvantaged circumstances as measured by the share of young men who are disconnected. Despite increasing high school completion rates and a steep rise in employment rates of young men, 2016 disconnect rates remain high: 20.1, 12.6, and 10.1 percent for black, Latino and white young men, respectively. This study should spur increased efforts to combat this problem. I believe there should be a greater emphasis on certificate and other vocation training programs, particularly those offered by the community colleges, rather than academic programs.
In addition, race continues to have an independent explanatory power, suggesting that cultural factors may have an impact on the behaviors of a subgroup of young black men. Many criminologists will claim that this correlation is spurious because they embrace what is called a race-crime invariance thesis. For instance, Ruth Peterson and Lauren Krivo claim that
crime rates are higher on average in African American than other neighborhoods, not because this group is more criminally oriented, but because African American communities have the highest average levels of disadvantaged social conditions owing to the role of race in structuring opportunity and community access.
However, this study adjusted for these factors and yet race remained an important determinate of violent crime rates. Sociologist Mark Berg observes that, in high violent crime areas, many “decent youths adopted a violent public posture — even though it violated their own personal beliefs in conventional norms — in order to deter the aggressive overtures of other youths in their neighborhood.” Ta-Nehisi Coates gives a vivid example of the price youth pay if they don’t adopt this public posture. As a young man in a middle-school “gifted” program, Coates was vulnerable to his more brutal peers. For a time Coates avoided fights: “My style was to talk and duck.” But, eventually, he could not talk his way out of trouble. When hit in the face, he “busted out crying.” The news of this reverberated around the school. “From then on, I was the weakest of marks, and my weakness was despised,” Coates recounted.
For the good of all Americans, we must pursue the right anti-violence policies. We must develop strategies that counter a culture of violence that infects high crime areas, we must focus on disconnected youth who are at risk of engaging in violent crime, and we must find common ground with law enforcement in order to develop effective policing policies.
Robert Cherry is economics professor at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center.
