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Last year, I predicted that violent crime would start declining once the George Floyd protests end and the COVID-19 pandemic abates. Preliminary data for murders, the best violent crime indicator, support my forecast. Big-city homicides for 2022 were 5% below the 2021 figures. While these are early returns and there are always unforeseeable events, there are reasons to believe that we're not in the midst of a protracted crime boom.
Crime booms are long-term, perhaps a decade or more—unlike crime spikes, which last a year or two. Whether we'll suffer the prolonged agony—as in the late 1960s to the early 1990s, what I call the "crime tsunami" era—depends on the factors that cause the upswing.
In 2020-2021, the causal factors—the dreadful pandemic and the George Floyd disturbances—had significant but short-term impact on crime. COVID-19 made police reluctant to interact with suspects except when making arrests for serious offenses. Crime complaints by the public didn't get the usual response; some departments told their officers to remain in their patrol cars. Massive and widespread protests over Floyd's death led police to prioritize crowd control over crime control. Fierce anti-police rhetoric and a loss of public support demoralized law enforcement; police retirements spiked while recruitment suffered. Jails put offenders back on the streets by turning away misdemeanants or releasing inmates wholesale in order to reduce the spread of COVID in the facility. Some states adopted bail reforms that kept offenders out of jail altogether. And a new crop of progressive district attorneys, in misguided efforts to reduce so-called mass incarceration, declined to prosecute numerous misdemeanors and agreed to light sentences even for some violent felons.
The good news is that most of these crime generators didn't last very long. Contrast the crime boom that began in the late 1960s, when the causes were long-term. The late-20th-century crime tsunami was largely driven by three factors: (1) large-scale rural-to-urban migration of African Americans and immigration to big cities of Hispanic populations; (2) massive growth in the youth population, as the Baby Boomers hit their most crime-prone years (ages 18-25); and (3) a criminal justice system gone soft, overwhelmed by the unexpected explosion in crime. There even was a potent short-term factor—the crack cocaine craze—which sent violent crime soaring in the late 1980s after it had begun to ease at the start of that decade.
Fortunately, long-term causes like those that drove the crime tsunami aren't present today, though attempts to weaken the criminal justice system by reducing incarceration or restricting the police do constitute a real threat to public safety.
Take immigration, for example. There were 10.6 million lawful permanent immigrants to the United States from 2010 to 2019. Just under 40% of these immigrants were from the Americas, not including Canada. Thirty-eight percent were from Asia. When crime spiked in 2020 and 2021, immigration declined by nearly one-third due to the pandemic, so it is doubtful that the immigrant influx caused the spike.
Asian immigrants to the United States have been by and large law-abiding, even though, surprisingly, many are impoverished. I recently noted a Columbia University study finding that nearly one-quarter (23%) of New York City's Asian population was below the poverty line, a proportion exceeding that of the city's Black population (19%). Yet Asian violent crime is exceptionally low. Asian murder arrest rates were 1.2 per 100,000; African American rates were 10.5 per 100,000.
Though many people associate Hispanic immigrants with crime, the evidence is mixed. I looked at homicide rates in five cities with high and growing Latino populations: Miami (69% Hispanic in 2020), Riverside, California (50%), Houston (43%), Phoenix (31%), and Chicago (26%). Each of these cities is in a county that had an 11-22% growth in its Hispanic population over the last U.S. Census decade (2010-2020)—among the highest in the United States. Despite this increase in Latinos, the homicide rates over the same decade declined in Houston (-7%) and Miami (-43%) and held steady in Phoenix (+.07%). Though homicide rates rose in Chicago (+12%) and Riverside (+82%), the Riverside numbers were small in absolute terms (murders went from 9 to 17), and the Chicago murder increase probably was more attributable to Black than Hispanic violence.
Based on this admittedly rough analysis, it is doubtful that foreign immigration, Hispanic or otherwise, was responsible for the crime spike of 2020-21 or will exacerbate crime rates in the years ahead.
As for domestic migration, a little-noticed Black relocation trend may result in a crime reduction over the next decade. From 2010 to 2020, nine of the 10 cities with the highest proportions of African Americans (Houston was the exception) saw a decrease in their total number of Black populations. Some of the declines were dramatic: Detroit shed over 277,000 of its African American residents; Chicago over 261,000; New York in excess of 176,000.
What about demographics? No one doubts that the Baby Boom youth bulge fed the late 1960s crime tsunami. But now the Boomers are driving the graying of America, and seniors don't commit much violent crime. In 1980, the age 20-34 bracket comprised 26% of the United States population; in 2021, their proportion has dropped to 20%. By contrast, those aged 50-65 were 26% of the population in 1980, whereas in 2021 they were 36%. And the projections for the U.S. population are for continued aging, which may be a problem for the Social Security system, but definitely not for the criminal justice system.
The one red flag is the strength of the criminal justice system. Starting in the late 1960s, the system buckled in the face of a sudden massive crime overload. As I have written elsewhere, "police couldn't cope with the greater number of offenders, courts couldn't convict or imprison as many defendants as they had earlier, and people who were convicted spent less time behind bars." This systemic weakness helped fuel the crime increase and took over a decade to reverse.
Today, we have a different problem: ideologically driven pressure to intentionally weaken our capacity to deal with crime. Progressives have pushed for weakened police and mass decarceration. But if we resist these dangerous policy choices, crime rates should return to normal levels.
Barry Latzer is professor emeritus at New York's John Jay College of Criminal Justice. His latest book is The Myth of Overpunishment: A Defense of the American Justice System and A Proposal to Reduce Incarceration While Protecting the Public (Republic Books).
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
