Crime rateFlorida’s falling crime rate has experts puzzled
With unemployment at record highs and police departments struggling with budget cuts, the fact that Florida’s crime rate has fallen nearly 33 percent in the last decade has many experts puzzled
With unemployment at record highs and police departments struggling with budget cuts, the fact that Florida’s crime rate has fallen nearly 33 percent in the last decade has many experts puzzled.
Declining crime rates during economically depressed times is contradictory to logic and experts attribute a range of factors to the trend including new technology, an aging population, and low inflation.
Richard Rosenfeld, a criminologist at the University of Missouri at St. Louis, said most studies linking crime to the state of the economy only examined the unemployment rate, which is too narrow.
Instead, Rosenfield is exploring crime’s relationship to other economic factors like inflation.
According to Rosenfield, this recession has been characterized by low inflation, which has kept the prices of goods down, which in turn makes little incentive to create illegal underground markets. In addition technology has given people access to other non-traditional marketplaces like Craigslist, eBay, and Etsy.
Rosenfield also credits technological breakthroughs like car security and cell phones with embedded GPS tracking devices with making society safer.
Echoing Rosenfield’s sentiments, Eric Baumer, a criminologist at Florida State University, said, “The world we live in is much different than decades ago. Life has changed a lot.”
Baumer added that with more people unemployed, they are spending more time at home which gives thieves fewer opportunities to break in.
With the U.S. population getting older, crime rates have also fallen.
“As the population ages, the fraction of the population that commits crime at a high rate is smaller,” Rosenfeld said.
This year alone, according to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, crime in the state is down 2 percent compared to the previous year.
In certain areas like Hillsborough, which saw a nearly 15 percent decrease in crime, the crime rate has fallen even more.
“I think it’s got to be a combination of factors,” said St. Petersburg police Chief Chuck Harmon. “I just don’t think that anybody knows what they all are.”
