Understanding the Time Path of Crime

Abstract

With all of the random factors that influence the amount of criminal conduct, it is virtually impossible to fully explain or precisely predict the crime rate at any point in time.If the World Trade Center bombers had succeeded in their goal of toppling the.massive towers, tens of thousands could have died in New York that one day in 1993.The nation's annual murder rate would have doubled or tripled from one incident.Fortunately, such extreme catastrophes are rare-the comparatively minor but still horrific killing of 168 residents of Oklahoma City in 1995 was too small against the background of 21,600 murders across the nation to have a pronounced effect on the U.S. murder rate in that year. 1 There will always be random events that escalate the rate of crime, such as innovations in illegal drug markets, and, similarly, random events that tend to depress it, such as bad weather (it keeps the criminals at home), charismatic religious leaders, or widespread reductions in enthusiasm for illegal drugs.The primary goal then, in understanding the long-run trends in crime and what is likely to happen in the future, is to take one's focus off the short-term fluctuations so one can identify the stable long-run patterns.Distinguishing stable trends from temporary fluctuations is essential to understanding how crime is affected by changes in criminal justice policy, as well as by varying social, economic, and demographic influences.If we confuse fluctuations with trends, our predictions of where crime