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Crime is the Problem: Homicide, Acquisitive Crime, and Economic Conditions

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Abstract

A question that emerges from recent research on the relationship between economic conditions and street crimes committed for monetary gain concerns the effect of changing economic conditions on violent crime. I propose that the economy stimulates violent crime indirectly through its effect on acquisitive crime. This hypothesis is evaluated in fixed-effects panel models of change in acquisitive crime and homicide rates between 1970 and 2006. The analysis indicates that collective perceptions of economic conditions have a significant effect on an index of acquisitive crime and an indirect effect, through acquisitive crime, on homicide. Consistent with this result, the effect of collective economic perceptions is stronger for felony than argument-related homicides. A promising focus for future research is the role of underground markets in the production of both property and violent crime.

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Notes

  1. Quoted in Saviano (2007: 15).

  2. An entire issue of the Journal of Quantitative Criminology in 2001 (vol 17, issue number 4) was devoted to Cantor and Land’s research on temporal change in unemployment and crime rates.

  3. The sociological theories augment the standard economic account by proposing that individual cost-benefit calculations are subject to cultural and social constraints. Additionally, not all sociological theories hold that criminal behavior is preceded by perceptual change (see Rosenfeld and Fornango 2007: 509).

  4. For example, “A man with a record for attempted burglary and receiving stolen property was charged Thursday with shooting an off-duty city firefighter who interrupted intruders in his home the day before” (Ratcliffe 2009).

  5. The National Crime Victimization Survey estimated that roughly 5.2 million robberies, burglaries, and motor vehicle thefts occurred in 2000, a ratio of 338 acquisitive crimes for each homicide (Rennison 2001). If .014% of these victimizations resulted in a homicide, they would have accounted for 4.6% of the homicides in 2000.

  6. The term “underground market” encompasses a broad range of undocumented economic activities, many of which do not entail serious law violations, such as failing to report small amounts of taxable income. I use the term in a more restricted sense in this paper to refer to the marketing of illegal products and selling and receiving stolen goods.

  7. Little has changed since the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice wrote in 1967: “More information is needed about the nature of the market for illicit goods and the extent to which the demand for various types of goods affects the incidence of theft. More should be learned about the relationship of legitimate and illegitimate markets” (quoted in Klockars 1974: 1).

  8. Personal correspondence with Marc Swatt (February 18, 2009). The Fox and Swatt (2008) SHR data set also includes homicides associated with other circumstances, including gang killings and “suspected felony type.” They have been combined with felony homicides in the current analysis.

  9. Data from the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) are not subject to this source of measurement error but are unavailable for the current analysis because they cannot be disaggregated by census region prior to 1986. The UCR crime data used in the analysis are from the Bureau of Justice Statistics (http://bjsdata.ojp.usdoj.gov/dataonline/).

  10. The unemployment data are from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (http://www.bls.gov/); the GDP data are from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (http://www.bea.gov/index.htm); and the ICS data are from the Reuters-University of Michigan Surveys of Consumers (http://www.sca.isr.umich.edu/).

  11. Regression analysis of nonstationary time series can produce spurious results (Raffalovich 1994). Augmented Dickey-Fuller and Phillips-Perron tests for a unit root were conducted on the A-Crime, homicide, felony homicide and argument homicide regional time series. The null hypothesis of a unit root could not be rejected for any of the series. When transformed to first differences, all series are difference stationary. Results available from the author on request.

  12. Personal correspondence with Marc Swatt (February 18, 2009).

  13. A serious measurement challenge that must be overcome is the use of drug arrests (e.g., Ousey and Lee 2002) or drug overdoses (e.g., Martinez et al. 2008) as proxies for drug market activity. The former indicator confounds drug market activity with drug enforcement efforts and the latter does not distinguish between drug transactions and drug use.

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  1. University of Missouri-St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, USA

    Richard Rosenfeld

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Rosenfeld, R. Crime is the Problem: Homicide, Acquisitive Crime, and Economic Conditions. J Quant Criminol 25, 287–306 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10940-009-9067-9

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