Ailing u.s. economy brings fears of a crime wave

It is the inquiry on the minds of New Yorkers, once they stop pondering the fate of their retirement funds: If the city's economic system sinks to depths not seen in decennary, will crime tax return with a retribution?

Expert sentiment differ, but the inquiry is barely illogical. The last time stocks on Wall Street fell hard, in 1987, crime was exploding, and the city saw historic highs in murders in the followers years.

earlier that, the fiscal crisis of the 1970s helped lead to the forsaking of neighborhoods, failing schools and startling crime rates: Robberies built through those years to a high in 1981, when there were 107,495 of them, for an norm of 294 a day. (The figure of total reported robberies last year, 21,787, was the lowest figure in modern history.)

"Every recession since the late '50s has been associated with an addition in crime and, in specific, property crime and robbery, which would be most responsive to alteration in economic conditions," said Richard Rosenfeld, a sociologist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Typically, he said, "there is a year lag betwixt the economic change and crime rates."

New York has over the last 15 years seen an extraordinary drop in crime, from the most serious to the mildly irritating. But across all those years, economic expert and sociologists have debated how much of the success was attributable to new tendency in policing and how much to other factors, including a robust economic system.

Now, if the dire predictions of economic hardship prove accurate, the city may be poised to find out in a real time experiment. And it will have to behavior that experimentation with one thousand fewer police force officers than it had in 2001.

The police force commissioner, Raymond Kelly, said he did not subscribe to the idea that there was a strong connection between a city's financial fortunes and its safety. He said he and his top commanders had had informal talks about the current economic conditions and what they might mean for crime, but had set no specific policy changes in motion.

"We have had lots of conversations, but not a tactical or strategic meeting," Kelly said. "The reason for that is we have not seen it manifest itself in economic downturns in the past. But we have to be sensitive to the issue."

The police chief of Los Angeles, William Bratton, said California had been struggling with an ailing economy for some time but had seen no appreciable rise in crime. In Providence, Rhode Island, however, Colonel Dean Esserman, the police chief, said he had recently seen a shift for the worse.

Neighborhoods are changing as homes are abandoned or foreclosed on, he said. More young people are on the streets. There are more Fire Department calls as people steal copper plumbing from empty houses, causing flooding.

"I see poverty as having a tremendous impact on both spirit and crime, and it is palpable," Esserman said in a telephone interview after attending a national meeting of police chiefs in Washington on Wednesday on crime and the economy.

The Police Executive Research Forum said that in preparing for the national meeting, it conducted a survey of more than 200 law enforcement agencies in the last week of July, after the collapse of Bear Stearns and the bailouts of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Nearly 40 percent of the agencies said home foreclosures had produced an impact on their law enforcement activities, either by a loss in tax revenue or an uptick in crime around abandoned houses.

Interviews with criminologists, economists and police commanders across the United States suggest that in the end the correlation between fiscal calamity and rising crime may be a nuanced equation, as it was in the Great Depression, when crime rates dropped from their upswings during Prohibition.

It is rare, many said, that one would see the crime rate rise based on occasional opportunistic criminal activity that comes with a tight economy: people shoplifting, for instance, when the family budget gets pinched. But the mortgage crisis and house foreclosures could set off reactions that hurt neighborhoods, which then give rise to a dynamic that becomes more conducive to criminal behavior.

"You see a strong relationship between falling wages and higher unemployment rates for less educated men and crime rates that tend to go up," said Bruce Weinberg, an associate professor of economics at Ohio State University, who studied data from 1979 to 1997.

Others have reached different conclusions. In fact, some researchers have suggested that it is in economic good times when the threat of crime may be greatest. In urban settings, at least, there are more potential victims: more people walking the streets, carrying shopping bags, lining up at ATMs or driving around and parking their expensive cars.