Along with a number of its sister publications, including U.S. News & World Report, Time Magazine (Feb. 22, 2010) would have the general public believe crime in America has virtually disappeared from the social scene. In an article titled “Why Crime Went Away,” Time informed the public that the nation’s murder rate is at “all-time” low but did caution that the recession may take this good news away. In the article’s two lead paragraphs, Time writer David von Drehle presented “statistics” to “prove” that violent crime has plummeted in America in recent decades:

“Health care, climate change, terrorism—is it even possible to solve big problems? The mood in Washington is not very hopeful these days. But take a look at what has happened to one of the biggest, toughest problems facing the country 20 years ago: violent crime. For years, Americans ranked crime at or near the top of their list of urgent issues. Every politician, from alderman to President, was expected to have a crime-fighting agenda, yet many experts despaired of solutions. By 1991, the murder rate in the U.S. reached a near record 9.8 per 100,000 people. Meanwhile, criminologists began to theorize that a looming generation of so-called superpredators would soon make things even worse.

“Then, a breakthrough. Crime rates started falling. Apart from a few bumps and plateaus, they continued to drop through boon times and recessions, through peace and war, under Democrats and Republicans. Last year’s murder rate may be the lowest since the mid-1960s, according to preliminary statistics released by the Department of Justice. The human dimension of this turnaround is extraordinary: had the rate remained unchanged, an additional 170,000 Americans would have been murdered in the years since 1992. That’s more U.S. lives than were lost in combat in World War I, Korea, Vietnam and Iraq—combined. In a single year, 2008, lower crime rates meant 40,000 fewer rapes, 380,000 fewer robberies, half a million fewer aggravated assaults and 1.6 million fewer burglaries than we would have seen if rates had remained at peak levels.”

Again, Time offered a caveat: “no one can convincingly explain how the crime problem was solved.” Nonetheless, criminologists, law enforcement officials, gun rights advocates, penal experts, death penalty advocates, and even abortion rights advocates have offered their own self-serving explanations. For example,  famed criminologist James A. Foxx believes the declining crime rates are attributable to the “aging U.S. population.” But Time reported that police chiefs around the country, including former New York City chief William Bratton, tout improved law enforcement work as the basis for the decline. Maryland’s Prince George County Police Chief Roberto Hylton told Time that “a technology that we call Active Crime Reporting, which provides information every 15 minutes, so I can see, even from a laptop away from work, the whole crime picture of the county. I can shift resources. It actually provides me with the trends, patterns that have occurred the previous week, previous day, maybe even the previous year.”

The National Rifle Association (“NRA”) hails private gun ownership as the primary basis for receding crime rates. The NRA fondly points out that there are more than 250 million privately owned firearms in the United States, and that the rate of ownership increases on average by 4.5 million a year. The NRA boasts that while the rate of private gun ownership has increased, “the nation’s violent crime rate has been declining since 1991, and in 2008 fellow to a 35-year low,” including “the nation’s murder rate [which] fell to a 43-year low.”

Time cited Tufts University sociologist John Conklin’s book “Why Crime Rates Fell” in which Conklin, to the consternation of many criminologists, attributed the nation’s crime rate reduction to harsher federal and state sentencing practices which have led to more prisons and greater periods of incarceration for violent felons. Even some law enforcement officials, who cautiously subscribe to Conklin’s harsh sentencing/long incarceration rates as the basis for a safer society, do not endorse the practice. San Francisco Police Chief George Gascon told Time that “increased sentencing in some communities have removed entire generation of young men. Has that been a factor in lowering crime? I think it probably has. I think it also probably has had a detrimental effect on those communities.”

Capital punishment proponent Wesley Lowe, who maintains the Pro Death Penalty Web Page, lists a litany of studies—some reputable, others not—espousing the theory that the death penalty is a deterrent to violence crime. Dudley Sharp, the Death Penalty Resources Director for the pro-death penalty group “Justice For All,” closely monitors anti-death penalty websites or any website that posts anti-death penalty articles to rebut their arguments with praise for the deterrent value of the death penalty and its impact on violent crime.

Finally, Time cited “renegade economist Steven Levitt” who has speculated that “legalized abortion caused the drop in crime” because “fewer unwanted babies in the 1970s and ‘80s grew up to be thugs in the 1990s and beyond.”

Each of the groups scour “Government reports” for statistical support and even conjure up their own “statistics” to press the social agenda they are advocating. Joel Best, the author of “Damned Lies and Statistics: Untangling Numbers from the Media, Politicians, and Activists” (May 2001), aptly observed that “bad statistics live on; they take on lives of their own.”

Let’s put Best’s theory to a test. The Time article stated “last year’s murder rate was the lowest since the mid-1960s.” According to The Disaster Center (“TDC”), there were 193,526,000 people in the United States in 1965, of which 9,960 were murdered that year. In 2008 (the latest year for complete figures), there were 304,059,275 people in this country and the nation experienced 16,272 murders that year. Statistically speaking, in 1965 one murder was committed for every 17,432 people in this country while in 2008 one murder was committed for every 18,686 people. The implication of these statistics is that Americans were as “safe” in 2008 as they were in 1965.

But not so fast, Charlie. Let’s look at the realities behind these “compelling” statistics. The TDC reported that in 1965 there were a total 387,390 violent crimes recorded in the U.S. that year—one violent crime for every 500 Americans. On the other hand, in 2008 there were a total of 1,382,012 violent crimes reported in the U.S.—one violent crime for every 292 Americans. While Time lauded the possibility that crime may have taken a vacation in this country, these statistics indicate Americans were nearly twice as likely to be a victim of a violent crime in 2008 as they were in 1965.

So assuming, based on the TDC statistical data, violent crime was a far greater problem in 2008 than in 1965, why was the murder rate basically the same during both years? While criminologists to “renegade” economists cite everything from age to abortion as the reason for the disparity, we feel there was a more practical reason: the “ambulance-homicide theory.” This theory formulated by University of Massachusetts criminologist Anthony R. Harris in his influential 2002 article, “Murder and Medicine: The Lethality of Criminal Assault” (Homicide Studies, May 2002), in which Harris said improved trauma care in the nation’s urban hospitals has dramatically increased the chances of gunshot victims surviving their injuries.

There is ample support for Harris’ ambulance-homicide theory. The National Foundation for Trauma Care issued a report in 2004 titled “U.S. Trauma Center Crisis: Lost in the Scramble for Terror Resources” which said the U.S. death rate from assaults has been lowered by 70 percent because of trauma care centers. Trauma care centers were established in this country following the Vietnam War when the emergency medical services (“EMS”) built by the military was incorporated into the nation’s health care delivery system following that war. The National Foundation for Trauma Care said these trauma centers “proliferated in the 80’s, led by a passionate group of physicians, nurses and emergency personnel committed to saving injured lives.”

The growing presence of trauma care centers and enhanced EMS care in “emergency rooms” did not escape the attention of The New York Times. In 1994, Times reporter Warren E. Leary wrote an in-depth piece about the trauma care center at the Washington Hospital Center which is frequently called upon to deal with victims of gunshot and multiple gunshot wounds ferried in by helicopter in what the center’s director, Dr. J. Duncan Harviel, called an “epidemic of gun violence and stupidity.” Dr. Harviel told the Times that death rates from a single gunshot wound, and even from multiple gunshot wounds, had been significantly reduced by trauma center care.

FBI statistics routinely show that nearly 70 percent of all homicides in this country are committed with a firearm. Most of those homicides involve young people, predominantly African-Americans. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (“CDC”) in 2009 reported that approximately one-third of the 17,030 homicides committed in 2006 in this country involved victims ages 10 to 24. 87 percent of those victims were males, with African-Americans being three times more likely of being a homicide victim than Hispanics and six times more likely than whites.

These statistics tell two stories: first, most gunshot victims in this country are young which gives their stronger bodies a greater chance of surviving their violent injuries when provided with immediate emergency room trauma care; and, second, most firearm shootings, especially those resulting in death, occur in neighborhoods away from mainstream society. This latter fact can certainly lead to a collective feeling fueled by misleading media reports that “main street” society is “safer” today because the murder rate has declined.

The reality, however, is that the “murder rate” has not truly declined. What has actually declined is the number of people dying from wounds intended to kill them. The Time report would have the public believe Americans are as safe from violence today as they were in the mid-1960s when, in reality, Americans are three times more likely to be a victim of violence today than in the mid-1960s. And even that “statistic” is skewed: of the 1,382,012 violent crimes reported in 2008, a significant percentage of them (some sources put the number at 25 percent) were committed by the same hardcore group of offenders, and most of these violent crimes occurred in depressed African-American neighborhoods in the nation’s 16 largest cities where blacks, according to the U.S. Justice Department, are eight times more likely to be victims of violent crime than non-blacks. The CDC last year said homicide is the leading cause of death among African-Americans between the ages of 10 and 24.

The bottom line is this: statistics can be manipulated to reflect any social agenda. Joel Best, describing his own book “Damned Lies and Statistics,” had this to say about “bad” statistics:

“This is a book about bad statistics, where they come from, and why they won’t go away. Some statistics are born bad—they aren’t much good from the start, because they are based on nothing more than guesses or dubious data. Other statistics mutate; they become bad after being mangled. Either way, bad statistics are potentially important: they can be used to stir up public outrage or fear; they can distort our understanding; and they can lead us to make poor policy choices.

“The notion that we need to watch for bad statistics isn’t new. We’ve all heard people say, ‘You can prove anything with statistics.’ My title, Damned Lies and Statistics, comes from a famous aphorism (usually attributed to Mark Twain or Benjamin Disraeli): ‘There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.’ There is even a useful little book, still in print after more than forty years, called How to Lie with Statistics.

“Statistics, then, have a bad reputation. We suspect that statistics may be wrong, that people who use statistics may be ‘lying’—trying to manipulate us by using numbers to somehow distort the truth. Yet, at the same time, we need statistics; we depend upon them to summarize and clarify the nature of our complex society. This is particularly true when we talk about social problems. Debates about social problems routinely raise questions that demand statistical answers: Is the problem widespread? How many people—and which people—does it effect? Is it getting worse? What does it cost society? What will it cost to deal with it? Convincing answers to such questions demand evidence, and that usually means numbers, measurements, statistics.”

I wholeheartedly agree with Best: statistics are essential in understanding social problems such as crime. What I don’t subscribe to is “bad statistics” being used to create false impressions about serious social problems. For example, the Time article stated that had the murder rate remained “unchanged” from what it was in 1992, “an additional 170,000 Americans would have been murdered” since that year. The reality is that since 1992 someone tried to murder those 170,000 Americans (and I understand the number may actually be far higher) but they survived the intentional wounds meant to kill them because good doctors, nurses, and EMS personnel provided them with immediate and professional trauma care which saved their lives; in a nutshell, the “ambulance-homicide theory” worked as it was created to do in the Vietnam War. Those 170,000 Americans who survived attempts to take their lives have a much different view of what Time called the “human dimension” of the crime problem than the one presented by David von Drehle, primarily for the consumption of “main street” America.

More to the precise point, Time emphasized the notion that most Americans no longer see “crime” as a leading social problem—and public opinion polls since the 9/11 tragedy bear this out. However, I firmly believe that most of those Americans—those from the ranks of mainstream society—would see crime as a more pressing social problem if they had to live just one weekend in a “housing project” in a major urban area. While I am pleased that national publications like Time and U.S. News & World Report are paying attention to the crime issue, I certainly don’t subscribe to all the points they are trying to make.  

SOURCES:

 http://www.blogtalkradio.com/geogee/blog/2009/07/22/firearm-violence-in-america

http://crimereportblog.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/yv-datasheet-a1.pdf

http://www.traumacare.com/download/NFTC_CrisisReport_May04.pdf

http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=34a9a452bcbc75b2c5aff07ab9f9f83c

http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/9358/9358.intro.php

http://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/23/us/more-gun-violence-and-better-care-for-victims.html?pagewanted=all

http://www.nraila.org/Issues/FactSheets/Read.aspx?id=206&issue=007

http://www.vpc.org/studies/whochart.htm

http://www.wesleylowe.com/deter.html

http://www.johntfloyd.com/comments/january10/criminal-justice-violence.htm,