Back in 2004, when I was at the Naval War College, a major metro police chief from New England visited me to talk about Core-Gap dynamics in the seam between the inner city and the suburbs, a topic that still gets presented to me from those quarters. His prediction struck me as entirely sensible: all the 3-strikes and tougher sentencing of the 1990s was finally coming home to roost in that America was on the verge of starting to expel more ex-cons than new criminals being sentenced (something like 600k ex-cons hitting the street each year while 500k go in). Naturally, the prediction was that all of these ex-cons would step right back into the Gap-like conditions of their old neighborhoods and lapse back into criminal behavior.
Then you add in the financial/economic woes since mid-2008, and that seems like a recipe for a big spike in crime, yes?
But instead we get substantial drops in lots of major metros across 2009, with the biggest declines happening in the biggest cities (over one million population).
The credit? Better policing techniques across the board, plus some staffing help due to the stimulus package.
As a rule, we are told that it takes years for a crime drop to register in the minds of the public.
Then there's concern about chronic long-term unemployment + the end of the stimulus money.
So not all sunny, even as we celebrate this counterintuitive trend.