The “Great American Crime Decline”: Possible Explanations

Abstract

This chapter examines the key features of the crime decline in the United States during the 1990s–2010s but also takes a broader look at the violence declines globally. The author argues that violent and property crime trends might have diverged recently, with property crimes increasingly happening in the online sphere. An important distinction is made between ‘contact crimes’ that require a victim and offender to be present in the same physical space, and other crimes. Contrary to the uncertainties engendered by property crime, the declines in violent (contact) crime are rather general, and have been happening across all demographic and geographic categories within the United States and throughout the developed world. An analysis of research literature on crime trends has identified 24 different explanations for the crime drop. Each one of them is briefly outlined and examined in terms of conceptual clarity and empirical support, with 9 crime decline explanations highlighted as promising. Most of these promising explanations, being relative newcomers in the crime trends literature, have not been sufficiently empirically tested and thus require further research. One potentially fruitful avenue for future studies is to examine the association of the most promising crime decline explanations with improvements in self-control.