Home, Home on the Range

When I graduated from high school in the mid-90s, life in my home town in northern Minnesota was, for the most part, stereotypically idyllic. While there is not much crime in most rural areas anyway, my small town had almost none. I went to college wanting to to do police work in this way of life. The cops I knew never arrested anyone – they simply drove around town “BS-ing” with the locals and talking about where the fish were biting or who shot the biggest deer this season.

The year after I left, the taconite mine that literally built the town in the 50s unexpectedly and immediately shut down. Some of my classmates who had stuck around to live the lives their fathers had were shell-shocked when only a few months after signing 30-year mortgages they found out that their well-paying job had just been pulled out from underneath them. Many people speculated that the town would not make it. Taxes had been essentially paid by the mining company, and so there would be no money to fix roads and pay for teachers and cops (my parents still pay less than $200 PER YEAR for property taxes). As a result of the closure, many people left the town. Surprisingly, though, many people stayed. Many of the residents were retirees and could survive because of the low cost of living.

Something even more surprising has happened in the last few years: the price of precious metals has increased so much that now other mining companies are talking about coming back to the Iron Range. One company has spent the last 3 years fixing up the facilities abandoned by the original mine. There are multi-million dollar building projects going on and hundreds of new jobs are forecasted. In fact, everyone is talking about this being the biggest economic boom for northeastern Minnesota in a generation. Seems like all good things for my childhood community.

The question I want to pose here, is, what are the social (and criminological) implications of such a rapid change? The area went from boom to bust and now back to an apparent boom in the matter of only a few years. Sounds like classic anomie to me. There is a very good article in the Duluth News-Tribune this morning written by an economist at the College of St. Scholastica in Duluth about some of these issues. Tony Barrett writes:

Face it, we’re in for several years of upheaval. Positive upheaval, for the most part, but upheaval nonetheless. Change does not come easily for anyone and the communities on the Range will be no different.

Are we prepared for such changes and should we expect an increase in crime as a result? How will the life-long Rangers get along with those who come from elsewhere? What can we do NOW to prepare for the changes? There is very little analysis of rural crime issues in the literature, though it seems to me that this is a case study of how rapid social change can affect rural areas.

It is the economy, stupid

As you can see from my last post, I have been bothered by taxes and the seemingly inevitable recession. Here is a nice Op-Ed from the LA times on the relationship between economics and crime. I would also suggest checking out the first article in the latest issue of Criminology - Volume 45 (4), pp. 735-769. Good stuff.

"1-in-100" Report

I'm sure you all saw this yesterday:

A new report from the Pew Center on the States indicates that one in 100 Americans is behind bars (in jail or prison) -- the highest incarceration rate in our nation's history.

You can check out the full report, published by the Pew Center's Public Safety Performance Project, here. A New York Times article about the report's findings can be found here.

Crime in the STL

Here is an excellent interview from Richard Rosenfeld on NPR On The Media. It is so well done. Truly a model for young scholars. It is perfect for a class discussion.

http://www.umsl.edu/services/ur/media/umslair/071116.mov

**Bring on ASC 2008. I will continue this post later with more information on hotels, attractions, etc.

Silly Crime Statistics

I am sure that most have seen the new rankings of most violent cities. Detroit and St. Louis top the list once again. As we all know, crime statistics not the best way to make cross-city comparisons. Rick Rosenfeld regularly sends letters to the editor when these crime rankings are released. I posted this on my blog a while back, but it is worth repeating here.

Silly crime rankings versus real numbers

Some figures are a lot more meaningful than others.
Author: Richard Rosenfeld

Americans love to compare themselves to one another. We rank our automobiles, body fat, annual income and our children's standardized test scores. We also rank the crime rates of our communities.Morgan Quitno Press, a statistical analysis firm based in Lawrence, Kan., recently released its annual rankings of city crime. Residents and officials from cities with low ("safe") rankings greeted the news with pleasure; those with high ("dangerous") rankings attacked the rankings as unfair or faulty.

A recent Post-Dispatch editorial cautioned readers against taking such comparisons seriously. But the best response to the crime rankings is not to ignore them but to understand how they are made and what their limitations are. That way, when they appear again -- and they will -- residents will be able to accept or reject them on objective grounds, not simply because their city scored high or low. Here are fundamental questions to consider:*

On what crimes are the rankings based?
Do they mix different types of crimes? Are crimes that differ in seriousness given the same weight? Morgan Quitno ranked cities on a crime index containing offenses as diverse as murder, rape and motor vehicle theft. Although all are serious crimes, most people would rather have their car stolen than be the victim of a violent assault. Yet, Morgan Quitno gave each crime in its index the same weight. Crime comparisons should be based on crimes of equal seriousness.*

How thoroughly are the crimes measured?
Crime rankings are based on offenses reported to local police departments. The FBI then compiles this information in crime statistics for the nation, states, counties and cities. Some offenses, such as homicide, are extremely well reported. Others, such as rape and other assaults, are frequently not reported to the police and never make it into the crime statistics. Police departments also differ in the way they classify and record the crimes reported to them.Rankings, therefore, may be influenced by differences in crime reporting and recording practices that have nothing to do with the amount of crime residents actually experience. Crime rankings should not be based on offenses, such as rape and assault, that are subject to large differences in reporting and recording from city to city. Morgan Quitno's crime index includes both of these offenses.*

Do rankings account for variations among neighborhoods within cities?
All cities consist of a small number of high-crime areas and a much larger number of low-crime areas. Crime rates for different neighborhoods within a single city typically differ more than than differences between cities. Truly useful data would break out crime rates for the various areas of a given city. Such information may be available from local police departments, often on Web sites. Overall city crime rankings say nothing about where in a city crime is high or low.*

How has crime changed over time?
People intending to live or do business in a city need to know something about trends over time, not simply the level of crime at a single moment. Morgan Quitno ranked St. Louis among the nation's most "dangerous" cities in 2004, yet St. Louis' homicide rate has been cut in half over the previous 10 years. By definition, snapshot accounts say nothing about whether crime is going up or down.*

Can local police and city officials be held accountable?

Police and other local officials often complain that they are held accountable for crime, even though they have little control over the economic and social conditions that produce it. For the last several years, my colleagues and I have taken homicide rates for various cities and adjusted them for differences in poverty, unemployment, family disruption and other crime-producing conditions.The adjusted rankings show that homicide rates in some cities, St. Louis among them, are lower than one would expect, based on conditions of economic and social disadvantage. Other cities, meanwhile, have higher-than-expected rates.These figures do not let police or other officials off the hook. On the contrary, they provide a more meaningful comparison of city homicide levels and insight into the effectiveness of criminal justice policies and programs for which local officials absolutely should be held responsible.Rankings of crime rates should be based on well-measured crimes of equal seriousness and identify differences in crime within cities and over time that are produced by factors city officials can control. The Morgan Quitno crime rankings fails on all counts.---

Additional information on reading and using crime statistics is available at http://www.cjgsu.net/initiatives/HomRates-PR-2004-05-14.htm

Lead (Pb) and Crime

This is just interesting...an economist is linking the increased use of unleaded gasoline to decreased crime rates, featured on my favorite News for Nerds site.

http://science.slashdot.org/science/07/10/23/1839245.shtml

I know about some of the studies where increased levels of lead in the water used by a community have been linked to increased crime levels in that community....this just expands upon that.
Pretty neat.