crime rate in big cities essay

America’s Suburban Crime Problem

A fter several years of rising crime, big city mayors and police chiefs across the country are breathing a sigh of relief. Statistics published by the Council of Criminal Justice and other recent analysis show the number of homicides and aggravated assaults fell by a respective 10% and 3% in big cities in 2023 compared to 2022, though the rates remain higher than in pre-pandemic years.

These are hopeful signals. If these trends persisted on a national scale, this could indicate violent crime markets have retracted. But declarations that violent crime is falling miss important—and disturbing—crime trends data that paint a much more complicated picture. While big city crime may be falling, suburban crime may be rising. More surprising still, crime in rural areas appears to be rising even faster—and a much higher share of this crime involves strangers and guns.

These startling findings come from an important but underappreciated nationally representative data source—the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS)—that includes crimes not reported to police. Along with last year’s big city estimates, the latest figures from the FBI's 2022 UCR program gathered from police reports, and the Bureau of Justice Statistics' NCVS report drawn from interviews with households, present a complex narrative that does more than merely highlight differences in data collection methods but unveils a nuanced and evolving picture of violent crime in the U.S.

Besides a slight rise in robbery rates from 65.5 to 66.1 per 100,000 residents, the UCR program suggests a national decrease in both the rates of fatal (homicide) and non-fatal felony violence (rape, robbery, and aggravated assault) from 2021 to 2022.  In contrast, the NCVS shows an increase in non-fatal felony violence, with victimizations per 1,000 persons over the age of 12 increasing from 5.6 in 2021 to 9.8 in 2022, primarily due to a doubling of aggravated assault rates. NCVS estimates imply that a substantial portion of crime remains unreported, the so-called " dark figure " of crime that eludes the detection of law enforcement.

A clearer picture of who is at greatest risk for violent victimization emerges when analyzing crime rates by location. The NCVS shows that the traditional boundaries between urban and non-urban violence are dissolving. Suburban and rural areas, once considered safe havens, are now confronting a jump in non-fatal violent crime, fundamentally changing the geography of public safety.

The robbery rate in urban centers increased by 21% over the three years, driven largely by the 78% increase between 2021 and 2022. Looking at the suburbs, the 2022 increase in robbery rates hit 21%, contributing to the 40% increase through 2021. In the rural areas where the American dream of pastoral peace is most cherished, robbery rates rose by 44% in 2022 after a two-year decline.

This shift is further accentuated in the rates of aggravated assault, which have not only risen in urban areas but have skyrocketed in non-urban areas. In urban centers, these assaults have risen by 51% in a single year from 2021 to 2022. Looking back at the suburbs and rural areas, the respective increases were even more pronounced with rates over nearly three times and two times higher in 2022 than in 2021.

Gun violence also increased and spread across geographies. The gun-related victimization rate in urban centers increased by 1.3 per 1,000 in 2022 compared to the previous year, reaching 2019 levels after a decrease. This rate doubled over the past two years in the suburbs and is slightly higher than in 2019, while in rural areas, there was a surge in non-fatal gun violence rates, with approximately 66,000 more reported victimizations between 2021 and 2022, returning to rates last observed in 1997.

Research suggests most violent crimes are committed by someone the victim knows such as friends, acquaintances, and relatives. This remains the case, but estimates indicate strangers are responsible for more violent crimes, especially in non-urban centers. After decreases in the number of violent felony victimizations involving strangers from 2019 to 2021, all areas experienced large increases by 2022. For this one-year period, these types of victimizations climbed by 37% in urban areas, 73% in the suburbs, and more than doubled (102%) in rural locales.

Read More: If We Want to Reduce Deaths at Hands of Police, We Need to Reduce Traffic Stops

Breaking down the data by race adds a layer of complexity to the narrative. White Americans have seen a marked increase in victimization, particularly in urban areas, reversing previous declines. From 2021 to 2022, violent felony victimization for this group rose by 75% in urban areas, 93% in suburban areas, and 62% in America’s countryside.

For Black Americans, the pattern is more complex, with an initial rise in urban victimization rates followed by a 20% decrease from 2021 to 2022. However, the increase in violent felonies in suburban areas paints a troubling picture of the changing risks these communities face. For Black Americans residing in the suburbs, the rate of violent felonies spiked 74% over the three years, with a sharp leap of 172% from 2021 to 2022. Outside the metropolitan centers, the three-year increase is less dramatic (29%) but still alarming.

The rise in violent crime comes at a time of historic domestic migration . During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and associated lockdowns, people and families relocated from cities to the suburbs and rural locales, motivated by the flexibility of remote work and the desire for safer, more affordable, and more spacious living environments. Studies have found that violent victimization influences residential mobility, but it appears more factors are at play. As people migrate, they not only bring their dreams and aspirations but also create economic tensions and cultural integration challenges that can ferment crime and complicate public safety efforts. It's in this intersection of mobility and security that we must revisit our approach to crime prevention and intervention.

Although the Justice Department's Roadmap provides resources based on the Ten Essential Actions Cities Can Take to Reduce Violence Now , developed by the Council on Criminal Justice, the evidence is mostly from studies conducted in urban areas. Efforts to reduce violent crime in non-urban areas face challenges such as limited resources, large territories that inhibit community engagement and response times, despite initiatives like the BJA’s Rural and Small Department Violent Crime Reduction Program that collaborate with law enforcement agencies (LEAs) to develop strategies addressing these issues and Crime Analyst in Residence program intended to assist LEAs in enhancing their operational and procedural management through the utilization of data analysis and analytics.

This shift observed in the NCVS also calls for examination of the racial differences in victimization rates—particularly the heightened vulnerability of white Americans in urban settings and the complex pattern of rising and then decreasing rates for Black Americans.

Further research is needed to address gaps and uncertainties in the valuable insights provided by NCVS, particularly with regards to how victimization rates influence residential mobility within urban centers, the potential underestimation of victimization among Black people, and the variations within different areas. It is imperative to also examine the challenges posed by response rates to the NCVS, especially among hard-to-reach populations.

Meanwhile, NCVS estimates force us to seriously consider that criminal violence might be evolving rather than declining, necessitating the development and adoption of effective strategies like proven community violence reduction initiatives as well as housing, public health, and employment programs adapted to the particular needs and strengths of suburban and rural communities. Otherwise, there is a danger of resourcing and implementing urban-centric, pre-pandemic strategies in a post-pandemic world that misses the opportunity to improve community safety across racial and geographic divides.

While the recent data suggests a decrease in urban crime, many Americans still feel uneasy. It's conceivable that the pronounced changes in victimization, particularly in suburban and rural areas, have heightened this sense of vulnerability. The discrepancy between the actual numbers and public perception challenges us to consider the changing geography of crime and the impact it has on the nation's sense of security.

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Are big cities more dangerous than small ones.

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Are big cities more dangerous than small ones? Of course they are. This is so obvious that it’s not even a question most people would think of asking.

And yet, if you’ll bear with me for a bit, it turns out there’s more of a mystery here than you might think. In 1996, for example, Ed Glaeser and Bruce Sacerdote wrote a paper trying to figure out why there’s more crime in big cities. They came up with a couple of reasons. First, there’s more valuable stuff to steal in big cities, so robbery is more profitable. Second, it’s easier to be anonymous. If you mug someone in Mayberry, there’s a good chance your victim will recognize you and report the crime. Beyond that they threw up their hands, suggesting that perhaps the rest of the difference might be due to the fact that families are less intact in big cities. But even after running batteries of statistical tests, they were still left scratching their heads. Sure, there are more broken families in big cities, but that “still leaves unanswered the question of why this variable is so important in leading to criminal behavior.” What’s more, “the results on higher benefit levels and lower arrest rates are intriguing but also not entirely satisfying.”

Well, if that’s not satisfying—and it isn’t—how about an answer out of left field? Maybe the real answer is that big cities aren’t much more dangerous than small ones. Let me explain.

In a nutshell, the lead-crime hypothesis is simple: Exposure to gasoline lead in small children produces heightened aggressive tendencies. When an entire generation of children was exposed to lead in the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s, thanks to the boom in auto sales after World War II, it led to a huge rise in violent crime when the children grew up in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s. The more lead they were exposed to, the more crime you got.

So where did we see the most exposure to gasoline lead? Answer: in places with the densest concentration of automobiles. And that’s in the inner core of big cities. In the early ’60s, big cities had double the ambient air lead levels of midsize cities, which in turn had air lead levels 40 percent higher than small cities. ( Nevin, p. 316. ) So if lead exposure produces a rise in crime, you’d expect to see a bigger rise in big cities than in small ones. Over time, big cities would become increasingly more dangerous than small ones.

Likewise, when lead was removed from gasoline, and children started to grow up normally, you’d expect to see a bigger crime decrease in big cities. Over time, crime rates would start to converge.

The convergence between big and small cities is startling, and the biggest cities have shown the biggest drops. Violent-crime rates have declined by more than 75 percent in New York City and Los Angeles since their peaks in the early ’90s.

So the surprising truth is that big cities are only a bit more dangerous than small ones. For a few decades it seemed otherwise, but this was mostly an artificial difference driven by higher concentrations of gasoline lead. Take that away, and it turns out that Los Angeles isn’t much different from Modesto.

Assessing the Lead-Crime Evidence: A Followup

Lead and crime: assessing the evidence.

Kevin Drum Talks Lead and Crime on Melissa Harris-Perry

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How Did Lead Get Into Our Gasoline Anyway?

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• Open access
• Published: 01 December 2021

More crime in cities? On the scaling laws of crime and the inadequacy of per capita rankings—a cross-country study

• Marcos Oliveira   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-3407-5361 1 , 2  

Crime Science volume  10 , Article number:  27 ( 2021 ) Cite this article

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Crime rates per capita are used virtually everywhere to rank and compare cities. However, their usage relies on a strong linear assumption that crime increases at the same pace as the number of people in a region. In this paper, we demonstrate that using per capita rates to rank cities can produce substantially different rankings from rankings adjusted for population size. We analyze the population–crime relationship in cities across 12 countries and assess the impact of per capita measurements on crime analyses, depending on the type of offense. In most countries, we find that theft increases superlinearly with population size, whereas burglary increases linearly. Our results reveal that per capita rankings can differ from population-adjusted rankings such that they disagree in approximately half of the top 10 most dangerous cities in the data analyzed here. Hence, we advise caution when using crime rates per capita to rank cities and recommend evaluating the linear plausibility before doing so.

Introduction

In criminology, it is generally accepted that crime occurs more often in more populated regions. In one of the first works of modern criminology, Balbi and Guerry examined the crime distribution across France in 1825, revealing that some areas experienced more crime than others (Balbi and Guerry, 1829 ; Friendly, 2007 ). To compare these areas, they realized the need to adjust for population size and analyzed crime rates instead of raw numbers. This method eliminates the linear effect of population size on crime numbers and has been used to measure crime and compare cities almost everywhere—from academia to news outlets (Hall, 2016 ; Park and Katz, 2016 ; Siegel, 2011 ). However, this approach overlooks the potential nonlinear effects of population and, more importantly, exposes our limited understanding of the population–crime relationship.

Though different criminology theories expect a relationship between population size and crime, they tend to disagree on how crime increases with population (Chamlin and Cochran, 2004 ; Rotolo and Tittle, 2006 ). These theories predict divergent population effects, such as linear and superlinear crime growth. Despite these theoretical disputes, however, crime rates per capita are broadly used by assuming that crime increases linearly with the number of people in a region. Crucially, crime rates are often deemed to be a standard means of comparing crime in cities.

Yet the widespread adoption of crime rates is arguably due more to tradition (Boivin, 2013 ) rather than its ability to remove the effects of population size. Many urban indicators, including crime, have already been shown to increase nonlinearly with population size (Bettencourt et al., 2007 ). When we violate the linear assumption and use rates, we deal with quantities that still have population effects, thus introducing an artifactual bias into rankings and analyses.

Despite this inadequacy, we only have a limited understanding of the impact of nonlinearity on crime rates. Although previous works have investigated population–crime relationships extensively (Alves et al., 2013a ; Bettencourt et al. 2010 ; Chang et al. 2019 ; Gomez-Lievano et al., 2012 ; Hanley et al., 2016 ; Yang et al., 2019 ), they have failed to quantify the impact of nonlinear relationships on rankings and restricted their analyses to either specific offenses or countries. The lack of comprehensive systematic studies has limited our knowledge on how the linear assumption influences crime analyses and, more critically, has prevented us from better understanding the effect of population on crime.

In this work, we analyze burglaries and thefts in 12 countries and investigate how crime rates per capita can misrepresent cities in rankings. Instead of assuming that the population–crime relationship is linear, we estimate this relationship from data using probabilistic scaling analysis (Leitão et al., 2016 ). We use our estimates to rank cities while adjusting for population size, and we then examine how these rankings differ from rankings based on rates per capita. In our results, we find that the linear assumption is unjustified. We show that using crime rates to rank cities can lead to rankings that considerably differ from rankings adjusted for population size. Finally, our results reveal contrasting growths of burglaries and thefts with population size, implying that different crime dynamics can produce distinct features at the city level. Our work sheds light on the population–crime relationship and suggests caution in using crime rates per capita.

Crime and population size

Different theoretical perspectives predict the emergence of a relationship between population size and crime. Three main criminology theories expect this relationship: structural, social control, and subcultural (Chamlin and Cochran, 2004 ; Rotolo and Tittle, 2006 ). In general, these perspectives agree that variations in the number of people in a region have an impact on the way people interact with one another. These theories, however, differ in the types of changes in social interaction and how they can produce a population–crime relationship.

From a structural perspective, a higher number of people increases the chances of social interaction, which increases the occurrence of crime. Two distinct rationales can explain such an increase. Mayhew and Levinger ( 1976 ) posit that crime is a product of human contact: more interaction leads to higher chances of individuals being exploited, offended, or harmed. They claim that a larger population size raises the number of opportunities for interaction at an increasing rate, which would lead to a superlinear crime growth with population size (Chamlin and Cochran, 2004 ). In contrast, Blau ( 1977 ) implies a linear population–crime relationship. He posits that population aggregation reduces spatial distance among individuals, thereby promoting different social associations such as victimization. At the same time, as conflictive association increases, other integrative associations also increase, leading to a linear growth of crime (Chamlin and Cochran, 2004 ). Notably, the structural perspective focuses on the quantitative consequences of population growth.

The social control perspective advocates that changes in population size have a qualitative impact on social relations, which weakens informal social control mechanisms that inhibit crime (Groff, 2015 ). From this perspective, crime relates to two aspect of a population: size and stability. A larger population size leads to higher population density and heterogeneity—not only do individuals have more opportunities for social contacts, but they are also often surrounded by strangers (Wirth, 1938 ). This situation makes social integration difficult and promotes a high anonymity, which encourages criminal impulses and harms a community’s ability to socially constrain misbehavior (Freudenburg, 1986 ; Sampson, 1986 ). Similarly, from a systemic viewpoint, any change (i.e., increase or decrease) in population size can have an impact on crime numbers (Rotolo and Tittle, 2006 ). From this viewpoint, the understanding is that regular and sustained social interactions produce community networks with effective mechanisms of social control (Bursik and Webb, 1982 ). Population instability, however, hinders the construction of such networks. In communities with unstable population size, residents avoid socially investing in their neighborhoods, which hurts community organization and weakens social control, thus increasing misbehavior and crime (Miethe et al., 1991 ; Sampson, 1988 ).

Both social-control and structural perspectives solely focus on individuals’ interactions without considering their private interests. These perspectives pay little attention to how unconventional interests increase with urbanization (Fischer, 1975 ) and how these interests relate to misbehavior.

In contrast, the subcultural perspective advocates that population concentration brings together individuals with shared interests, which produces private social networks built around these interests, thereby promoting social support for behavioral choices. Fischer ( 1975 ) posits that population size has an impact on the creation, diffusion, and intensification of unconventional interests. He proposes that large populations have a sufficient number of people with specific shared interests, thus enabling social interaction and lead to the emergence of subcultures. The social networks surrounding a subculture bring normative expectations that increase the likelihood of misbehavior and crime (Fischer, 1975 ,, 1995 ).

These three perspectives—structural, social control, and subcultural—expect that a higher number of people in an area leads to more crime in that area. In the case of cities, we know that population size is indeed a strong predictor of crime (Bettencourt et al., 2007 ) . The existence of a population–crime relationship implies that we must adjust for population size to analyze crime in cities properly.

Crime rates per capita

In the literature, the typical solution for removing the effect of population size from crime numbers is to use ratios such as the following:

This ratio is often used together with a multiplier that contextualizes the quantity (e.g., crime per 100,000 inhabitants; Boivin, 2013 ). However, even though crime rates are popularly used, they present at least two inadequacies. First, the way in which we define population affects crime rates. The common approach is to use resident population (e.g., census data) to estimate rates, but this practice can distort the picture of crime in a place: crime is not limited to residents (Gibbs and Erickson, 1976 ), and cities attract a substantial number of non-residents (Stults and Hasbrouck, 2015 ). Instead, researchers suggest using ambient population (Andresen, 2006 ,, 2011 ) and accounting for criminal opportunities, which depends on the type of crime (Boggs, 1965 ; Clarke, 1984 ; Cohen et al., 1985 ; Harries, 1981 ).

Second, Eq. ( 1 ) assumes that the population–crime relationship is linear. The rationale behind this equation is that we have a relationship of the form

which means that crime can be linearly approximated via population. Given this linear assumption, when we divide crime by population in Eq. ( 1 ), we are trying to cancel out the effect of population on crime. This assumption implies that crime increases at the same pace as population growth. However, not all theoretical perspectives agree with this type of growth, and many urban indicators, including crime, have been shown to increase with population size in a nonlinear fashion (Bettencourt et al., 2007 ).

Cities and scaling laws

Much research has been devoted to understanding urban growth and its impact on indicators such as gross domestic product, total wages, electrical consumption, and crime (Bettencourt et al., 2007 , 2010 ; Bettencourt, 2013 ; Gomez-Lievano et al., 2016 ). Bettencourt et al. ( 2007 ) have found that a city’s population size, denoted by N , is a strong predictor of its urban indicators, denoted by Y , exhibiting the following relationship:

This so-called scaling law tells us that, given the size of a city, we expect certain levels of wealth creation, knowledge production, criminality, and other urban aspects. This expectation suggests general processes underlying urban development (Bettencourt et al., 2013 ) and indicates that regularities exist in cities despite their idiosyncrasies (Oliveira and Menezes, 2019 ). To understand this scaling and the urban processes better, we can examine the exponent \(\beta\) , which describes how an urban indicator grows with population size.

Urban scaling laws and rates per capita. The way in which urban indicators increase with population size depends on the class of the indicator. A Social aspects, such as crime and total wages, increase superlinearly with population size, whereas infrastructural indicators (e.g., road length) increase sublinearly. B  In nonlinear scenarios, rates per capita still depend on population size

Bettencourt et al. ( 2007 ) presented evidence that different categories of urban indicators exhibit distinct growth regimes. They showed that social indicators grow faster than infrastructural ones (see Fig.  1 A). Specifically, social indicators, such as the number of patents and total wages, increase superlinearly with population size (i.e., \(\beta > 1\) ), meaning that these indicators grow at an increasing rate with population. In the case of infrastructural aspects (e.g., road surface, length of electrical cables), an economy of scale exists. As cities grow in population size, these urban indicators increase at a slower pace with \(\beta < 1\) (i.e., sublinearly). In both scenarios, because of nonlinearity, we should be careful with per capita analyses.

When we violate the linear assumption of per capita ratios, we deal with quantities that can misrepresent an urban indicator. To demonstrate this, we use Eq. ( 3 ) to define the per capita rate C of an urban indicator as follows:

which implies that rates are independent from population only when \(\beta\) equals to one—when \(\beta \ne 1\) , population is not cancelled out from the equation. In these nonlinear cases, per capita rates can inflate or deflate the representation of an urban indicator depending on \(\beta\) (see Fig.  1 B). This misrepresentation occurs because population still has an effect on rates. By definition, we expect that per capita rates are higher in larger cities when \(\beta > 1\) , whereas when \(\beta < 1\) , we expect larger cities to have lower rates. When we use rates to compare cities in nonlinear situations, we introduce an artifactual bias. To compare cities properly, previous works have proposed scaled-adjusted indicators that account for population size (Alves et al., 2013a ; Bettencourt et al., 2010 ), supporting the need for population adjustment but failing to quantify the impact of the linear assumption on rankings of urban indicators.

More crime in cities?

In the case of crime, researchers have found a superlinear growth with population size. Bettencourt et al. ( 2007 ) showed that serious crime in the United States exhibits superlinear scaling with exponent \(\beta \approx 1.16\) , and some evidence has confirmed similar superlinearity for homicides in Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico (Alves et al., 2013b ; Gomez-Lievano et al., 2012 ). Previous works have also found that different kinds of crime in the United Kingdom and in the United States present nonlinear scaling relationships (Chang et al., 2019 ; Hanley et al., 2016 ; Yang et al., 2019 ). Remarkably, the existence of these scaling laws of crime suggests fundamental urban processes that relate to crime, independent of cities’ particularities.

This regularity manifests itself in the so-called scale-invariance property of scaling laws. It is possible to show that Eq. ( 3 ) holds the following property:

where \(g(\kappa )\) does not depend on N  (Thurner et al., 2018 ). From a modeling perspective, this relationship reveals two aspects about crime. First, we can predict crime numbers in cities via a populational scale transformation \(\kappa\)  (Bettencourt et al., 2013 ). This transformation is independent of population size but depends on \(\beta\) , which tunes the relative increase in crime such that \(g(\kappa ) = \kappa ^\beta\) . Second, Eq. ( 4 ) implies that crime is present in any city, independent of size. This implication arguably relates to the Durkheimian concept of crime normalcy in that crime is seen as a normal and necessary phenomenon in societies, provided that its numbers are not unusually high (Durkheim, 1895 ). Broadly speaking, the scale-invariance property tells us that crime in cities is associated with population in a somewhat predictable fashion. Crucially, this property might give the impression that such regularity is independent of crime type.

However, different types of crime are connected to social mechanisms in different ways (Hipp and Steenbeek, 2016 ) and exhibit unique temporal (Miethe et al., 2005 ; Oliveira et al., 2018 ) and spatial characteristics (Andresen and Linning, 2012 ; Oliveira et al., 2015 , 2017 ; White et al., 2014 ). It is plausible that the scaling laws of crime depend on crime type. Nevertheless, the literature has mostly focused on either specific countries or crime types. Few studies have systematically examined the scaling of different crime types, and the focus on specific countries has prevented us from better understanding the impact of population on crime. Likewise, the lack of a comprehensive systematic study has limited our knowledge about the impact of the linear assumption on crime rates. We still fail to understand how per capita analyses can misrepresent cities in nonlinear scenarios.

In this work, we characterize the scaling laws of burglary and theft in 12 countries and investigate how crime rates per capita can misrepresent cities in rankings. Instead of assuming that the population–crime relationship is linear, as described in Eq. ( 2 ), we investigate this relationship under its functional form as follows:

Specifically, we examine the plausibility of scaling laws to describe the population–crime relationship. To estimate the scaling laws, we use probabilistic scaling analysis, which enables us to characterize the scaling laws of crime. We use our estimates to rank cities while accounting for the effects of population size. Finally, we compare these adjusted rankings with rankings based on per-capita rates (i.e., with the linear assumption).

We use data from 12 countries to investigate the relationship between population size and crime at the city level (see the appendix for data sources). Specifically, we examine annual data from Belgium, Canada, Colombia, Denmark, France, Italy, Mexico, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States (see Table  1 ). In this work, we characterize how crime increases with population size in each country, focusing on burglary and theft. We analyze both crimes in all considered countries, except Mexico, Portugal, and Spain, where we only have data for one type of offense.

The population–crime relationship in 12 countries. Different criminology theories expect a relationship between population size and crime, predicting divergent population effects, such as linear and superlinear crime growth. Despite these theoretical disputes, however, crime rates per capita are broadly used by assuming that crime increases linearly with population size

The scaling laws of crime in cities

To assess the relationship between crime Y and population size N (see Fig.  2 ), we model \(\mathrm{P}(Y|N)\) using probabilistic scaling analysis (see the Methods section). In our study, we examine whether this relationship follows the general form of \(Y \sim N^\beta\) . First, we estimate \(\beta\) from data, and we then evaluate the plausibility of the model ( \(p>0.05\) ) and the evidence for nonlinearity (i.e., \(\beta \ne 1\) ). Our results reveal that Y and N often exhibit a nonlinear relationship, depending on the type of offense.

The scaling laws of crime. We find evidence for a nonlinear relationship between crime and population size in more than half of the data sets. In most considered countries, theft exhibits superlinearity, whereas burglary tends to display linearity. In the plot, the lines represent the error bars for the estimated \(\beta\) of each country–crime for two consecutive years; circles denote a lack of nonlinearity plausibility; triangles represent superlinearity, and upside-down triangles indicate sublinearity

In most of the considered countries, theft increases with population size superlinearly, whereas burglary tends to increase linearly (see Fig.  3 ). Precisely, in 9 out of 11 countries, we find that \(\beta\) for theft is above one; our results indicate linearity for theft (i.e., absence of nonlinear plausibility) in Canada and South Africa. In the case of burglary, we are unable to reject linearity in 7 out of 10 countries; in France and the United Kingdom, we find superlinearity, and in Canada, sublinearity. In almost all considered data sets, these estimates are consistent over two consecutive years in the countries for which we have data for different years (see Appendix  1 ).

Our results suggest that the general form of \(Y\sim N^\beta\) is plausible in most countries, but that this compatibility depends on the offense. We find that burglary data are compatible with the model ( \(p>0.05\) ) in 80% of the considered countries. In the case of theft, the superlinear models are compatible with data in five out of nine countries. We note that in Canada and South Africa, where we are unable to reject linearity for theft, the linear model also lacks compatibility with data.

We find that the estimates of \(\beta\) for each offense often have different values across countries—for example, the superlinear estimates of \(\beta\) for theft range from 1.10 to 1.67. However, when we analyze each country separately, we find that \(\beta\) for theft tends to be larger than \(\beta\) for burglary in each country, except for France and the United Kingdom.

In summary, we find evidence for a nonlinear relationship between crime and population size in more than half of the considered data sets. Our results indicate that crime often increases with population size at a pace that is different from per capita. This relationship implies that analyses with a linear assumption might create distorted pictures of crime in cities. To understand such distortions, we must examine how nonlinearity influences comparisons of crime in cities, when linearity is assumed.

Bias in crime rates per capita. When crime increases nonlinearly with population size, we have an artifactual bias in crime rates. The linearity in Portugal makes rates independent of size (left). However, in Denmark (right), because of the superlinear growth, we expect larger cities to have higher crime rates, but not necessarily more crime than expected. For example, though Aalborg and Solrød have similar theft rates, less crime occurs in Aalborg than expected for cities of the same size, based on the model, whereas Solrød is above the expectation

The inadequacy of crime rates and per capita rankings

We investigate how crime rates of the form \(C = Y/N\) introduce bias in the comparisons and rankings of cities. To understand this bias, we use Eq. ( 3 ) to rewrite crime rate as \(C \sim N^{\beta - 1}\) . This relationship implies that crime rate depends on population size when \(\beta \ne 1\) . For example, in Portugal and Denmark, this dependency is clear when we analyze burglary and theft numbers (see Fig.  4 ). In the case of burglary in Portugal, linearity makes C independent of population size. In Denmark, since theft increases superlinearly, we expect rates to increase with population size. In this country, based on data, the expected theft rate of a small city is lower than the rates of larger cities. We must account for this tendency in order to compare crime in cities; otherwise, we introduce bias against larger cities.

To account for the population–crime relationship found in data, we compare cities using the model P ( Y | N ) as the baseline. We compare the number of crimes in a city with the expectation of the model. For each city i with population size \(n_i\) , we evaluate the z score of the city with respect to \(P(Y|N=n_i)\) . The z score indicates how much more or less crime a particular city has in comparison to cities with a similar population size, as expected by the model. These z scores enable us to compare cities in a country and rank them while accounting for population size differences. In contrast, crime rates per capita only adjust for population size in the linear scenario. This approach is similar to previously proposed indicators that adjust for population size (Alves et al., 2013a ; Bettencourt et al., 2010 ). In our case, the adjustment also accounts for the variance. We denote this kind of analysis as a comparison adjusted for the population–crime relationship.

For example, in Denmark, the theft rate in the municipality of Aalborg ( \(\approx 0.0186\) ) is almost the same as in Solrød ( \(\approx 0.0188\) ). However, less crime occurs in Aalborg than expected for cities of a similar size, while crime in Solrød is above the model expectation (see Fig.  4 B). This disagreement arises because of the different population sizes. Since Aalborg is more than 10 times larger than Solrød, we expect rates in Aalborg to be larger than in Solrød. When we account for this tendency and evaluate their z scores, we find that the z score of Aalborg is \(-2.47\) , whereas in Solrød the z  score is 2.43.

Such inconsistencies have an impact on the crime rankings of cities. The municipality of Aarhus, in Denmark, for example, is ranked among the top 12 cities with the highest theft rate in the country. However, when we account for population–crime relationship using z scores, we find that Aarhus is only at the end of the top 54 rankings.

The inadequacy of per capita rankings. Per capita ranking can differ substantially from rankings adjusted for population size, depending on the scaling exponent. In Italy and Denmark, for example, A theft ranks (top) diverge considerably more than the ranks for burglary (bottom). Data points represent cities’ positions in the rankings. B In nonlinear cases, these rankings diverge, as measured via rank correlation

To understand these variations systematically, we compare rankings based on crime rates with rankings that account for the population–crime relationship (i.e., adjusted rankings). Our results reveal that these two rankings create distinct representations of cities. For each considered data set, we rank cities based on their z scores and crime rates C , and we then examine the change in the rank of each city. According to our findings, the positions of the cities can change substantially. For instance, in Italy, half of the cities have theft rate ranks that diverge in at least 11 positions from the adjusted ranking (Fig.  5 A). This disagreement means that these rankings disagree for approximately half of the top 10 most dangerous cities.

We evaluate these discrepancies by using the Kendall rank correlation coefficient \(\tau\) to measure the similarity between crime rates and adjusted rankings in the considered countries. We find that these rankings can differ considerably but converge when \(\beta \approx 1\) . The \(\tau\) coefficients for the data sets range from 0.6 to 1.0, exhibiting a dependency on the type of crime; or more specifically, on the scaling (Fig.  5 B). As expected, as \(\beta\) approaches 1, the rankings are more similar to one another. For example, in Italy, in contrast to theft, the burglary rate ranking of half of the cities only differs from the adjusted ranking in a maximum of two positions (Fig.  5 A).

Discussion and conclusion

Despite its popularity, comparing cities via crime rates without accounting for population size has a strong assumption that crime increases at the same pace as the number of people in a region. Though previous works have widely investigated the population–crime relationship, they have failed to quantify the impact of nonlinear relationships on rankings and restricted their analyses to either specific offenses or countries. In this work, we analyze crime in different countries to investigate how crime grows with population size and how the widespread assumption of linear growth influences cities’ rankings.

First, we analyzed crime in cities from 12 countries to characterize the population–crime relationship statistically, examining the plausibility of scaling laws to describe this relationship. Then, we used our estimates to rank cities and compared how those rankings differ from rankings based on rates per capita.

Our results showed that the assumption of linear crime growth is unfounded. In more than half of the considered data sets, we found evidence for nonlinear crime growth—that is, crime often increases with population size at a different pace than per capita. This nonlinearity introduces a population effect into crime rates, influencing rankings. We demonstrated that using crime rates to rank cities substantially differs from ranking cities adjusted for population size.

These findings imply that using crime rates per capita—though deemed a standard measure in criminal justice statistics—can create a distorted view of cities’ rankings. For example, in superlinear scenarios, we expect larger cities to have higher crime rates. In this case, when we use rates to rank cities, we build rankings whereby large cities are at the top. But, these cities might not experience more crime than what we expect from places with a similar population size. It is an artifactual bias introduced by population effects still present in crime rates.

Such effects arise from nonlinear population effects that persist in rates due to the linear assumption. This assumption is more than just a statistical subtlety. By assuming linearity, we essentially overlook cities’ context: we ignore the actual impact of population size on crime and how this impact depends on crime type, country, and aggregation units, among other things. For instance, our results indicate that in thefts, linearity is an exception rather than the rule. The indiscriminate use of crime rates neglects significant population–crime interactions that should be considered in order to compare crime in cities properly.

As a result of this inadequacy, we advise caution when using crime rates per capita to compare cities. We recommend evaluating linear plausibility before comparing crime rates. In general, we suggest comparing cities via the z scores computed using the approach (Leitão et al., 2016 ) discussed in the manuscript, thereby avoiding crime rates. It is important to emphasize that this inadequacy in rates is relevant only when comparing cities of different population sizes. In analyses without comparisons, a place’s crime rate can be seen as a rough indicator that contextualizes crime numbers relative to population size. Additionally, when cities have the same size, comparing crime rates boils down to comparing raw crime numbers.

In summary, in this work, we shed light on the population–crime relationship. The linear assumption is exhausted and expired. We have resounding evidence of nonlinearity in crime, which disallows us from unjustifiably assuming linearity. In light of our results, we also note that the scaling laws are plausible models only for half of the considered data sets. Better models are thus needed—in particular, models that account for the fact that different crime types relate to population size differently. More adequate models will help us better understand the relationship between population and crime.

Limitations

Our work presents limitations related to the way in which we define population, crime, and cities. First, we note that crime rates depend on how we define population; in our study, we define it as the resident population (i.e., census data). However, crime is not limited to residents (Gibbs and Erickson, 1976 ), and cities attract a significant number of non-residents (Stults and Hasbrouck, 2015 ). We highlight that this limitation is not specific to our study, and crime rates are often measured using resident population. Previous works have suggested using ambient population and accounting for the number of targets (Andresen, 2006 , 2011 ; Boggs, 1965 ). Collecting this data, however, is challenging, especially when dealing with different countries. Future research should investigate crime rates and scaling laws using other definitions of population, particularly using social media data (Malleson and Andresen, 2016 ; Pacheco et al., 2017 ).

Second, scaling analyses depend on the definition of what constitutes a city (Arcaute et al., 2014 ). In the literature, definitions include legal divisions (e.g., counties, municipalities) and data-driven delineations based on population density and economic interactions (Cottineau et al., 2017 ). It is possible that different city definitions yield divergent scaling regimes for the same urban indicator (Louf and Barthelemy, 2014 ). In our work, we only have access to crime data regarding specific aggregation units, and we thus define cities based on official legal divisions by using census data. City definitions in our analysis consequently depend on the country. We emphasize that we investigate whether per capita rankings are justified under a given city definition. Nevertheless, we believe that even though the use of other city definitions might change our quantitative results, our qualitative results are robust: the inadequacy of crime rates is independent of city definitions. When analyzing different definitions of cities, future research should examine scaling divergences as an opportunity to understand the population–crime relationship better.

Finally, cross-national crime analyses have methodological challenges due to international differences in crime definitions, police and court practices, and reporting rates, among other things (Takala and Aromaa, 2008 ). Although we avoid direct comparisons of countries’ absolute crime numbers in our work, we compare their growth exponents. In this comparison, we assume that cross-national differences have a negligible impact on how crime increases with population, particularly regarding the crime types we analyzed. We understand that some offenses (e.g., sexual assault, drug trafficking) are more sensitive to cross-national comparisons than the offenses we analyzed here (Harrendorf et al., 2010 ; Harrendorf, 2018 ). Collecting high-quality international comparative data could help future works in disentangling cross-national differences.

Probabilistic scaling analysis

We use probabilistic scaling analysis to estimate the scaling laws of crime. Instead of analyzing the linear form of Eq. ( 3 ), we use the approach developed by Leitão et al. ( 2016 ) to estimate the parameters of a distribution Y | N that has the following expectation:

that is, N scales the expected value of an urban indicator (Bettencourt et al., 2013 ; Gomez-Lievano et al., 2012 ; Leitão et al., 2016 ). Note that this method does not assume that the fluctuations around \(\ln y\) and \(\ln x\) are normally distributed (Leitão et al., 2016 ). Instead, we compare models for \(\mathrm{P}(Y|N)\) that satisfy the following conditional variance:

where typically \(\delta \in [1,2]\) , since urban systems have been previously shown to exhibit non-trivial fluctuations around the mean—the so-called Taylor’s law (Hanley et al., 2014 ). To estimate the scaling laws, we maximize the log-likelihood

since we assume \(y_i\) as an independent realization from \(\mathrm{P}(Y|N)\) . In this work, we use an implementation developed by Leitão et al. ( 2016 ) that maximizes the log-likelihood with the “L-BFGS-B” algorithm. We model \(\mathrm{P}(Y|N)\) using Gaussian and log-normal distributions in order to analyze whether accounting for the size-dependent variance influences the estimation. In the case of the Gaussian, the conditions from Eq. ( 5 ) and Eq. ( 6 ) are satisfied with

whereas in the case of the log-normal distribution,

In the log-normal case, note that, if \(\delta = 2\) , then the fluctuations are independent of N ; thus this would be the same as using the minimum least-squares approach (Leitão et al., 2016 ). With this framework, we compare models that have fixed \(\delta\) against models wherein \(\delta\) is also included in the optimization process. In the case of the Gaussian, we have fixed \(\delta =1\) and free \(\delta \in [1,2]\) , whereas in the case of the log-normal, we have fixed \(\delta =2\) and free \(\delta \in [1,3]\) . In this framework, p -values represent a statistic testing two crucial aspects of the modelling: sample independence and model compatibility with data. The statistic consists of the D’Agostino \(K^2\) test together with Spearman’s rank correlation of residuals, which evaluates compatibility and independence, respectively (Leitão et al., 2016 )

Finally, we compare each of the four models individually against the linear alternative (with fixed \(\beta = 1\) ), to test the nonlinearity plausibility. With the fits of all types of crime and countries, we measure the Bayesian information criterion ( \(\mathrm{BIC}\) ), defined as

where k is the number of free parameters in the model and lower \(\mathrm{BIC}\) values indicate better data description. The \(\mathrm{BIC}\) value of each fit enables us to compare the models’ ability to explain data.

Availability of data and materials

All data and source code are available at https://github.com/macoj/scaling_laws_of_crime/ .

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Appendix 1: Results from the probabilistic scaling analysis

To test the plausibility of a nonlinear scaling, we compare each model against the linear alternative (i.e., \(\beta =1\) ) using the difference \(\Delta \mathrm{BIC}\) between the fits for each data set. We follow Leitão et al. ( 2016 ) and define three outcomes from this comparison. First, if \(\Delta \mathrm{BIC} < 0\) , we say that the model is linear ( \(\rightarrow\) ), since we can consider that the linear model explains the data better. Second, if \(0< \Delta \mathrm{BIC} < 6\) , we consider the analysis of \(\beta \ne 1\) inconclusive because we do not have enough evidence for the nonlinearity. Finally, if \(\Delta \mathrm{BIC} > 6\) , we have evidence in favor of the nonlinear scaling, which can be superlinear ( \(\nearrow\) ) or sublinear ( \(\searrow\) ). We also use \(\Delta \mathrm{BIC}\) to determine the model \(\mathrm{P}(Y|N)\) that describes the data better. In Tables  2 and Table  3 , we summarize the results in that a dark gray cell value indicates the best model based on \(\Delta \mathrm{BIC}\) , a light gray value indicates the best model given a \(\mathrm{P}(Y|N)\) model, and \(*\) indicates that the model is plausible ( p -value \(>0.05\) ).

Appendix 2: Data sources

See Table 4 .

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Oliveira, M. More crime in cities? On the scaling laws of crime and the inadequacy of per capita rankings—a cross-country study. Crime Sci 10 , 27 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40163-021-00155-8

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The geography of crime in four U.S. cities: Perceptions and reality

Subscribe to transformative placemaking, hanna love and hanna love fellow - brookings metro , anne t. and robert m. bass center for transformative placemaking tracy hadden loh tracy hadden loh fellow - brookings metro , anne t. and robert m. bass center for transformative placemaking.

April 3, 2023

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This post was updated on April 7, 2023 with a correction for Figure 2A.

Chicago’s recent mayoral primary—in which “tough-on-crime” candidate Paul Vallas beat incumbent Lori Lightfoot to advance to an unprecedented runoff —divided many on the left and prompted some to declare the election as a new referendum on the politics of crime . Indeed, Chicago is far from the only U.S. city where crime is dominating local politics, with mayoral races from Denver to Philadelphia to Akron, Ohio all consumed by issues of public safety.

While stoking fears of crime is an age-old American election tactic , something feels different about its salience in the pandemic-era landscape. Faced with slow-recovering urban cores and predictions of an “urban doom loop,” many pundits and urban observers are returning to a playbook not fully deployed since the 1990s —pointing to public safety as the primary cause of a host of complex and interconnected issues, from office closures to public transit budget shortfalls to the broader decline of center cities . For some younger urban residents, this may be their first time living through this discourse , causing them to shift their behaviors—from where they spend their money to which neighborhoods they travel to and who they vote for.

Whether or not crime actually is up in central city business districts, widespread fear of crime—driven in no small part by relentless media coverage —certainly is. This is forcing urban leaders to simultaneously confront rising public safety concerns while grappling with the numerous economic, social, and civic aftershocks of an enormously disruptive three years. Unfortunately, many of these aftershocks—such as emptier streets and vacant storefronts—are the very same issues that negatively impact perceptions of safety in the first place.

As local leaders seek to rebuild safe and vibrant downtowns, they must do so without letting the perceptions and politics of crime drive policy and practice. This research brief aims to equip leaders with the evidence to do just that by: 1) presenting findings from nearly 100 interviews in four large U.S. cities (New York, Chicago, Seattle, and Philadelphia) on perceptions of crime; 2) providing spatial analysis of the geography of crime within these four cities; and 3) offering place-specific, forward-looking policy and practice solutions to chart a future in which all residents can feel—and actually be —safe regardless of where they live and work.

Brookings Metro’s Future of Downtowns project: This report is part of a larger mixed-methods research project that seeks to understand the future of American urban cores through interviews, spatial data analysis, and direct engagement with local leaders in New York, Chicago, Seattle, and Philadelphia. To gauge perceptions of cities’ downtown 1 health and recovery, we interviewed nearly 100 business leaders, major employers, public sector officials, and residents in fall 2022, 2 then juxtaposed qualitative findings with spatial analysis of population, employment, travel, real estate, crime, 3 and homelessness 4 data impacting downtown recovery. This brief synthesizes findings related to crime and safety, while future publications will focus on different structural issues influencing American cities as they seek to recover from the economic, social, fiscal, and civic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and associated disruptions. 5

Perceptions of rising crime are impacting downtown recovery

When we began qualitative interviews for this project in the fall of 2022, we expected to hear comments mirroring the think pieces of the day —something like, “The office is dead and downtowns are being held back by workers’ growing desire for flexible, remote work.” What we found instead is that residents and public and private sector leaders overwhelmingly pointed to another challenge they believed was preventing the recovery of center cities: fear of rising crime and a general sense of “disorder” compromising previously “safe” areas of their cities. Five key themes emerged from these conversations:

• Respondents overwhelmingly pointed to crime—not the desire for flexible work arrangements—as the top barrier preventing workers’ return to office. Across all four cities, the vast majority of residents, major employers, property owners, small business owners, and other stakeholders reported rising rates of violent crime and property crime downtown and indicators of “disorder” (such as public drug use) as the top barriers stopping workers from coming back to the office—and thus impeding downtown recovery.

“Safety, security, substance use, and mental health—just the experience in public areas—are the number-one issues preventing return-to-office.” — Seattle

In New York and Philadelphia, in particular, respondents cited several recent high-profile incidents of violence that occurred downtown as exacerbating factors (which, in New York, also may have been influenced by exponential increases in media coverage of crime in tourist hubs and subway stations). In both cities, such incidents can become conflated in the media as an inherent aspect of the “urban doom loop” threatening city recovery.

“People are scared. They’re afraid to walk on the streets. A woman on the first day of [return-to-office] got punched to the ground on the way to work across the street from our campus.” — Philadelphia

• Respondents also reported unsafe conditions on public transit as preventing workers and visitors from commuting downtown. Almost as often as stakeholders cited crime and a sense of disorder in downtowns as barriers to returning to the office, they described safety issues on public transit as hindering downtown commutes.

“Now it’s back to 1990s, it’s just mayhem on the train right now. Nobody wants to take it…It’s lawlessness on the train, and the buses are better, but the train is how most people got around. It’s the thing that connects the outside neighborhoods to Center City.”

— philadelphia.

While much of this concern was related to fear of violent crime on transit, people also commonly discussed other forms of criminalized and generally unwelcome activity, such as drug use and public urination. Such perceptions of disorder had a significant impact on residents’ sense of safety.

“Commuting on the Red Line, Blue Line, etc. is an experience that’s completely deteriorated. It’s drug use, smoking, and worse.”

• Small business owners and major retailers alike described increased property crime downtown as a major barrier to keeping their business open. From small mom-and-pops to major retailers, business owners reported higher costs for private security, reduced foot traffic, and increased theft as significant barriers to remaining open.

“There’s no question: The crime that’s gone up in this neighborhood is burglary, larceny. It’s all stealing. You can’t buy half-and-half anymore, it’s locked. You have to get an assistant to get half-and-half. Everything’s locked up.” — New York City

In many cases, stakeholders reported that this created a negative feedback loop in which businesses closed due to safety concerns for their workers, reducing foot traffic further and contributing to a greater sense of fear downtown.

“A lot of the stores have closed because they’re in places where people were congregating in ways that made other people feel unsafe. And so, they lost their customers and reopening is hugely burdensome because you can’t get anyone to come in because they don’t feel safe on that part of the sidewalk…If it’s a block that no one feels safe in, you can’t fix that.” — Seattle

• Residents and business owners in each city’s Chinatown neighborhood reported greater safety concerns than other downtown stakeholders—driven primarily by anti-Asian racism. Stakeholders who lived or operated a business in the Chinatown neighborhood of all four cities reported qualitatively different safety concerns than other downtown stakeholders. In addition to reporting fears of theft and burglary, they also cited concerns of anti-Asian racism and hate that increased during the pandemic—causing many business owners to question whether to remain within their districts and making safety a top concern for Asian residents in all four cities.

“If you ask anyone in Chinatown what their top three issues are, safety would be the first one.” — Chicago

• Respondents varied in their perceptions of the geographic distribution of crime within their cities. Respondents generally took a dichotomous approach to understanding where within their cities crime occurs—often taking a “downtown versus neighborhoods” view of public safety. Many in Chicago and Philadelphia, in particular, reported a perception that crime and conflicts “from the neighborhoods” were expanding into downtown and exacerbating safety issues there. This perception fueled fear among office workers who had previously seen downtown as relatively safe compared to other neighborhoods.

“When we had violence before, it was like, ‘Well, it’s over in that neighborhood. It’s over in that neighborhood.’ And now folks feel like it’s everywhere. ‘It doesn’t matter where I am, something could happen to me.’” — Philadelphia

In contrast, other stakeholders perceived that the attention paid to crime downtown came at the expense of addressing long-standing neighborhood safety concerns.

“If we’re looking at Black and brown communities, they’re not represented in the downtown area. In downtown, we’re looking at affluent communities with higher economic statuses. The focus on [downtown crime] is sensationalized because when something happens in Times Square, there is proximity to the more affluent individuals.” — New York City

The mismatch between perception and realities of crime: new spatial analysis.

After completing our interviews, we compared those perceptions with both national and neighborhood crime trends. Hyperlocal crime data reveals a significant mismatch between residents’ perceived understanding of where crime occurs in their city versus its actual spatial distribution. Several themes emerged from our research, which have significant implications for policy and practice.

National and citywide trends only tell one piece of a larger story about violent crime—but can have an outsized impact. Respondents’ overall perceptions of rising crime were not wholly unfounded, but they tended to reflect national and citywide crime rhetoric and sensationalized media coverage rather than an understanding of where and how crime actually occurs within their cities.

But after looking more granularly at this pandemic-era increase in murders within cities, it becomes clear that its toll was not distributed evenly. Instead, increases in homicides were largely concentrated in disadvantaged neighborhoods  that already had high rates of gun violence, along with significant histories of public and private sector disinvestment.

Figure 1 demonstrates these trends in Chicago. Overall, homicides there increased by 55% between 2019 and 2020 (driven by increases in gun homicides). But increases in gun homicides were concentrated in neighborhoods in the West Side (including Humboldt Park, Austin, West and East Garfield Park, and North Lawndale) and the South and Southwest Sides—all areas of the city with histories of segregation and disinvestment as well as significant contemporary socioeconomic inequities. This spatial concentration of pandemic-era homicides in disinvested neighborhoods took place in all 16 cities in which it has been studied, including three of our four study cities : Chicago, Philadelphia, and Seattle.

Local data on property and violent crimes shows that in New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago, downtowns are some of the safest places to be. Interview respondents were not only afraid of violence downtown. They also spoke to a significant perceived increase in property crimes such as retail theft, motor vehicle thefts, and robberies. Nationally, evidence would seem to bear this out, as robberies increased by 5.5%, nonresidential burglaries by 11%, larcenies by 8%, and motor vehicle thefts by 21% nationwide between 2021 and 2022.

However, when we looked at hyperlocal data, 7 we identified three primary findings related to property and violent crime downtown that defied these larger trends:

Citywide crime increased between 2019 and 2022, driven primarily by property crimes—but downtowns accounted for a very small share of these increases.

As shown in Figure 2a, between 2019 and 2022, there was a 48% increase in property crimes in Chicago; a 38% increase in Philadelphia; a 36% increase in New York; and a 17% increase in Seattle. For violent crime, there was a 5% increase in Chicago; 1% increase in Philadelphia; 26% increase in New York; and a 22% increase in Seattle.

However, as shown in Figure 2b, downtown Chicago accounted for just 6% of the citywide increase in property crime and less than 1% of the citywide increase in violent crime. Manhattan’s core drove 3% of the citywide increase in property crime and 2% of the increase in violent crime. Downtown Seattle accounted for less than 1% of the city’s increase in violent crime and 1% of the increase in property crime. And Center City Philadelphia accounted for less than 1% of the increase in both categories.

The share of all crimes happening downtown remained stable between 2019 and 2022—and in a few cases declined.

Another way to understand how crime may impact downtown recovery is to identify whether the share of citywide crimes occurring downtown increased during the pandemic. As Figure 3 demonstrates, our analysis found that across cities, the share of crimes that occur downtown has remained relatively stable since the onset of the pandemic, and actually declined in Seattle (for both property and violent crime), New York (property crime only), and Philadelphia (property crime only). That being said, there is wide variation across cohort cities in the share of crimes that occur downtown, with Seattle (despite declines) seeing the greatest share of both violent and property crimes occurring in its downtown.

While the share of violent crimes occurring downtowns remained stable, small increases from a low baseline can seem more significant than they are.

Mirroring nationwide trends, the share of violent crimes that are homicides increased significantly in all four cohort cities between 2019 and 2022—rising 44% in Philadelphia, 33% in Chicago, 11% in Seattle, and 9% in New York (Figure 4). As discussed above, the share of violent crimes taking place downtown remained relatively stable in all four cohort cities between 2019 and 2022 (Figure 3). 8 In 2019, for example, the share of Seattle’s violent crime occurring downtown was 32%; in 2022, it decreased to 30%. In New York, it went from 8% to 10% during the same period.

Importantly, however, even small changes in the relative share of violent crimes that occur downtown may have an outsized impact on perception. In New York, for instance, the 2% increase in the absolute share of violent crimes that occurred downtown represents a 22% change in the relative share of violent crime occurring downtown (Figure 4). New York’s downtown is still one of the safest places to be in the city (and has the lowest share of violent crime of all four downtowns studied), but its increase from such a low baseline (8% of all citywide violent crime) and extensive media coverage may be having an impact on perception.

Why the geography of crime matters

People deserve to feel—and actually be—safe regardless of where they live and work. Downtowns have experienced significant disruptions since the pandemic that have made workers, visitors, and residents feel uneasy. In particular, our interviews revealed that increased visibility of public drug use, high-profile violent crimes, vacant storefronts, emptier streets, and harassment are making residents feel as though their city is in disarray, and that the government isn’t doing much about it.

Pointing to the mismatch between where crime predominantly clusters and residents’ perceptions is not designed to delegitimize their concerns or deny the impact that crime in other parts of the city can have on perceptions of downtown. Rather, it is to demonstrate that the spatial distribution of crime has real implications for how local leaders can address it.

For instance, an extensive body of evidence demonstrates that targeting investment and interventions in higher-crime communities—in partnership and consultation with residents who actually live in those communities—is one of the most effective solutions for combatting violence. Yet, the voices of those most impacted by violence can be drowned out when the media, politicians, and the public are hyper-focused on crime downtown.

This was seen in the recent Chicago mayoral election, in which the majority of residents living in higher-crime neighborhoods in the South and West sides voted for Lightfoot , while residents of North and Northwest Chicago (including downtown and the Loop) voted for Vallas and his tough-on-crime agenda. This enabled a small geographic part of the city—that if it were a city itself, as Slate pointed out , “would be one of the safest big cities in the country”—to advance a public safety agenda not widely embraced by residents living in the most unsafe parts of the city. Moreover, a laser focus on addressing crime downtown or preventing crime from “spilling over” from the neighborhoods into downtown glosses over the shared fate of downtowns and neighborhoods , and the evidence on what works to promote safety for all residents of a city.

In short, perceptions matter because everyone should be able to feel safe, but also because perceptions can drive policy in a way that can inadvertently make residents less safe.

Toward a shared vision of safety, rooted in data and evidence

When perceptions of crime are misaligned with evidence, local leaders may feel pressure to pursue public safety solutions that are also not supported by evidence—at a significant cost to their constituents. Just in the past year, for instance, politicians in New York and Philadelphia considered returning to the controversial “stop-and-frisk” tactic, which has been found not only to not improve safety outcomes but to engender generational harms on youth of color. Increased emphasis on policing also has budgetary implications; New York, for instance, is exceeding its police overtime budget by nearly $100 million , while at the same time, city officials seek to make cuts to other critical citywide services such as libraries, schools, and government operations.

Rather than allowing perceptions alone to drive decisionmaking, local leaders can—and should—respond to rising fears of crime with evidence-based policies that match where, why, and how crime actually occurs within cities. This does not preclude providing reassurance to a society that has weathered an incredibly turbulent past three years, and in fact can serve a dual purpose of doing just that.

Below, we highlight key recommendations for improving safety and perceptions of safety downtown, with a particular focus on forward-looking investments. Notably, there are many other evidence-based practices that can promote safety tailored for higher-crime neighborhoods (some of which are covered here, but not all).

• Enhance alternative crisis response models for mental and behavioral health emergencies. In most cities and downtowns, police are the default responders for behavioral and mental health crises, which takes time and resources away from their ability to address other more pressing public safety concerns such as violent crime. A growing body of research demonstrates that alternative crisis response models—which send trained, non-police mental health professionals to respond to 911 calls related to homelessness, substance use, and mental health—are both more treatment-effective and cost-effective than traditional police responses. Promising examples include Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets (CAHOOTS) in Oregon, which responded to 17% of all city 911 calls and required police backup in less than 1% of cases in 2019, and has saved taxpayers an average of $8.5 million each year; and Denver’s  Support Team Assisted Response (STAR) , which has contributed to a  34% drop  in low-level crime, with visible results in the downtown area .  Seattle and New York are also taking strides to adopt and build out alternative crisis response programs.
• Invest in the built environment. Investments in the built environment —such as revitalizing vacant lots , painting sidewalks , and increasing greenery and street lighting —have been found to significantly reduce crime, and property crime in particular. In Philadelphia, for example, efforts to restore vacant lots reduced gun violence by 29%, burglaries by 22%, and nuisance crimes such as vandalism and noise complaints by 30% in nearby areas, while also significantly reducing perceptions of crime. Some of our study cities are beginning to adopt and scale these solutions. For example, in an effort to curb crime, Chicago has allocated $87 million in federal and bond funding under the Chicago Recovery Plan to turn vacant lots into housing and community spaces such as gardens, playgrounds, and shopping centers.
• Improve transit safety with innovative strategies. Holistic, root-cause approaches can be treatment- and cost-effective at reducing transit crime and enhancing feelings of safety on transit. For instance, hiring more transit outreach workers and increasing connections to social services for people experiencing homelessness can be more cost-effective than the police in reducing crime. So too can increasing staffing levels of unarmed personnel in booths and staffing public bathrooms . This evidence is incorporated in the design of the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority’s (SEPTA) SCOPE initiative in the Philadelphia region, which includes performance metrics and calls to action for partners, and has already won the 2022 Innovation Award from the American Public Transportation Association. Transit agencies can also consider infrastructure improvements such as increasing lighting and maintenance to reduce crime. Reducing wait times has also been found to improve perceptions of safety, particularly for women riders. Finally, both off-vehicle fare collection and zero-fare programs have been found to lead to significant declines in security incidents on transit.
• Address the intersection between economic security, employment, and safety. Research points to a promising body of interventions aimed at enhancing safety through economic opportunity. The most effective long-term solution is decreasing unemployment —much of the reduction in property crime seen during the 1990s can be attributed to the declining unemployment rate. More near-term solutions include launching summer job programs for youth ; bolstering job training and workforce development initiatives (particularly in locally growing fields); providing short-term financial assistance combined with therapy ; and offering higher wages for low-skilled jobs . Additionally, permanent supportive housing —which combines long-term rental assistance and supportive services to maintain housing stability—has consistently been shown to yield reduced police interactions and jail stays for those experiencing homelessness, increased housing security for homeless people (even those with severe disabilities and alcohol disorders ), and decreased arrests and recidivism rates for returning citizens . Downtowns and downtown-adjacent neighborhoods have a significant role to play in both long-term and short-term solutions. For instance in Philadelphia, the West Philadelphia Skills Initiative is seen as a partner in solving gun violence through its programs to address poverty through good-paying jobs.
• Strengthen placemaking and place governance. Residents’ feelings of social cohesion and belonging in a neighborhood are also associated with lower violent crime rates. Research has found that increasing the number of spaces for informal contact between neighbors (e.g., “third places” ) and investing in creative placemaking can enhance residents’ sense of safety in urban areas. Place governance and management organizations have a crucial role in the funding and management of placemaking, and have also been early adopters of non-police alternatives to safety. For instance, downtown business improvement districts pioneered the use of non-police, trained helpers (or “ambassadors”) as a visible, human component of “clean-and-safe” program implementation and an alternative to relying on law enforcement for all needs. Increasing the number and visibility of these ambassadors is a lower-cost, higher-impact way to address perceptions of disorder and provide reassurance to the public. And as crime data shows, it is not only downtowns that need this kind of support. In Chicago, the Corridor Ambassador program works through community-based organizations to extend the positive impacts of ambassador programs to neighborhood commercial corridors throughout the city.

Public, private, and civic sector leaders have the evidence and tools at their disposal to advance pragmatic solutions that can not only improve perceptions of safety, but also chart a future for cities in which all residents can actually be safe, regardless of their ZIP code.

Understanding the geography of crime within cities is crucial because safety solutions are not universal—what works to reduce certain crimes downtown may not work in other areas suffering from generations of disinvestment and segregation. And while there are evidence-based solutions that can improve safety across entire cities (such as enhancing access to economic opportunity, behavioral health care, and third spaces), public and private sector leaders must heed data and evidence when employing them to be effective in reducing crime and stewarding public dollars.

The future of urban economies rests in shared prosperity between downtown, neighborhoods , and their broader regions. The same is true for safety—all residents of a region deserve to feel and be safe, so leaders must deploy investments and interventions in a manner that is most effective and humane in achieving that goal.

The authors would like to thank Matthew Pruitt and Michael McVerry for their excellent research assistance on this piece. They also extend their sincere gratitude to Fred Cerullo (Grand Central Partnership), Michael Edwards (Chicago Loop Alliance), Paul Levy (Center City District), Samir Mayekar (City of Chicago), Julie Stein (City of New York), and Jennifer S. Vey for reviewing earlier drafts of this piece. Any errors that remain are solely the authors’.

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November 16, 2021

• For the purpose of this brief, New York’s “downtown” maps onto core Manhattan boundaries, meaning south of 59th Street. For maps of all four cities’ downtown boundaries, please see Breaking the ‘urban doom loop’: The future of downtowns is shared prosperity.
• All qualitative interviews capture respondents’ perceptions from fall 2022—reflecting a point in time that may not capture improvements or challenges that have happened since.
• This paper relies on publicly available crime trends reporting. However, it is important to note that many forms of harm and violence are not considered “crimes,” and many “crimes” themselves are constructs shaped by the norms and interests of a given society.
• While issues of public safety intersect with issues of unsheltered homelessness—in part because unsheltered homelessness influences perceptions of public safety and in part because people experiencing homeless are disproportionately likely to be both victimized and criminalized—this brief focuses primarily on publicly reported crime (property and violent). A forthcoming publication will focus entirely on findings related to homelessness.
• Sources for hyperlocal crime data include: 1) New York City Police Department’s historical crime data citywide and by precinct from 2019 through 2021, and weekly CompStat 2.0 reports for 2022 incidents both citywide and in Manhattan South’s Patrol Borough; 2) Philadelphia Police Department’s Year-End Reporting from 2019 to 2022 for citywide crime statistics, and the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office Incidents Report Database monitoring crime in Police Districts 6 and 9 from 2019 to 2022; 3) Chicago Police Department’s year-end reporting for District 1, District 12, and District 18 from 2019 to 2022; and 4) Seattle Police Department’s Crime Dashboard for citywide reporting and the following sub-precinct areas: D1, D2, D3, K1, K2, K3, M1, M2, M3, O1, O2, and Q3.
• National crime data after 2020 has significant limitations due to reporting changes in the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting program implemented in 2021.
• To get a more nuanced picture of the spatial distribution of crime, we identified police districts that most closely map onto cities’ downtown boundaries (see Endnote 5) and analyzed the following: 1) the extent to which downtown crime drove citywide increases in property and violent crime between 2019 and 2022; 2) changes in the share of downtown property and violent crimes between 2019 and 2022; and 3) changes in the nature of violent crime during the same period in each city and downtown.
• Not all local police departments reported violent crime broken down into categories, so we could not examine homicides separately here.

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Why Is There More Crime in Cities?

Crime rates are much higher in big cities than in either small cities or rural areas, and this situation has been relatively pervasive for several centuries. This paper attempts to explain this connection by using victimization data, evidence from the NLSY on criminal behavior and the Uniform Crime Reports. Higher pecuniary benefits for crime in large cities can explain approximately 27% of the effect for overall crime, though obviously much less of the urban- crime connection for non-pecuniary crimes such as rape or assault. Lower arrest probabilities, and lower probability of recognition, are a feature of urban life, but these factors seem to explain at most 20% of the urban crime effect. The remaining 45-60% of the effect can be related to observable characteristics of individuals and cities. The characteristics that seem most important are those that reflect tastes, social influences and family structure. Ultimately, we can say that the urban crime premium is associated with these characteristics, but we are left trying to explain why these characteristics are connected with urban living.

• Acknowledgements and Disclosures

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Sample Essay on Rising Crime Rates

Posted by David S. Wills | Nov 21, 2022 | Model Essays | 0

There are many common IELTS topics that you frequently see in task 2 of the writing test, and one of those is the topic of crime. Today, we are going to look at a sample essay relating to this subject and I’ll point out some useful ideas in terms of vocabulary and structure.

Analysing the Question

Before you start any IELTS essay, you should spend a moment thinking about the question. This is important because sometimes they can be trickier than they initially appear.

Here’s our question for today:

In many countries, the level of crime is increasing and crimes are becoming more violent. Why do you think this is and what can be done about it?

Fortunately, this is not a difficult question. The meaning is pretty straightforward and I think most people could grasp what they need to do. Ultimately, you need to do two things:

• Say why crime is increasing in frequency and level of violence
• Suggest some solutions to this problem

This is what’s known as either a “ cause and solution essay ” or “problem and solution essay.” Either way, you have two parts – either a cause or a problem and then a solution to that problem.

It is important you don’t focus only on one part. Also, in this particular question, don’t overlook the fact that it’s about both rising crime levels and rising violence levels.

Generating Ideas

This isn’t the easiest question to answer. Actually, it took me a while to think of some good ideas for it because, to the best of my knowledge, crime (and especially violent crime) has actually been decreasing in recent decades! Look at this line graph:

Of course, that’s just for Western Europe, and in some parts of the world the opposite trend can be observed. Here, we can see that some places have, sadly, seen a rise in homicides (that means the same as murder):

Considering the question, I had to think creatively. In those places that I don’t really know about, what factors could have caused rising crime levels and in particular rising violent crime rates?

To answer questions like this, it’s not enough just to be good at English. You need to have a good general knowledge and that means you should read widely, listen to podcasts, watch the news, and become an informed world citizen.

I have a whole article on learning to generate great ideas for IELTS essays.

Structuring your Essay

When it comes to cause and solution essays, I typically structure them like this:

There may be other great ways to structure your essay, but this is my preference. It allows me to write sample answers quickly and effectively, putting forth my position as clearly as possible in a very short time.

Think about it: You have two things to write, so why not put one in each of your body paragraphs? Simple!

I will structure this essay as follows:

In this sort of essay, it can be hard to write an introduction and in particular an essay outline . That’s because you aren’t putting forth any opinion and instead you’re hinting at the ideas that you will explain later.

I want to make clear in my essay that this is not an easy situation to explain and that it will also be hard to fix! Don’t worry. You can be honest. It’s better to give a nuanced explanation than to simply say, “We need the government to solve it.” That is simplistic and lacks intelligence.

Finally, remember to include a conclusion that summarises your ideas without repeating them.

Vocabulary about Crime

I have a whole article on the IELTS topic of crime and punishment . It gives lots of vocabulary and even includes a helpful video that can make learning more interesting!

In this essay, I will use the following words and phrases:

Remember that you can always learn more crime-related vocabulary by searching on Google News or just reading the newspaper each day. I highly recommend that you check out websites such as BBC News and The Guardian . You will see a lot of articles about crime there.

Sample Band 9 Answer

In some parts of the world, crime rates are increasing and the types of crime are becoming more violent. This can be attributed to urbanisation and the deterioration of traditional values and, in order to fix it, societies will need to work to give people more opportunities.

Whilst crimes rates are plummeting in most parts of the world, in some places they are on the rise. Obviously, the reasons for this depend on the individual location, but generally it seems to happen because people are moving from traditional ways of living to big cities. The problem is that, in small communities, people have purpose and accountability. In other words, a young man would be known by all the people in his village and have a job to do in order to contribute to that society. However, when the village disbands and he goes to the big city, it is not easy to make a good living. He might become part of a gang or become addicted to drugs. Without accountability and in the comparatively anonymous environment of the big city, he could easily become engaged in desperate and violent crimes.

Fixing this sort of problem is never easy, but there are various approaches. Certainly, it helps to improve policing but perhaps the problem can be stopped at its root if people are given more education and opportunity. These people would likely not turn to crime if they were supported as part of a community. Again, this is not an easy thing to facilitate, but it is possible through different approaches. Ultimately, the aim needs to be maintaining social values and giving people a sense of responsibility and purpose. When people have these things, they are much less likely to engage in violent crimes.

In conclusion, there are myriad reasons for crime rates increasing but perhaps urbanisation and the loss of traditional values are to blame. Giving people purpose and making them accountable for their own actions could counteract this.

As I mentioned above, I felt surprised that this question talked about rising crime rates but it does make sense when you think that certain countries or parts of countries are indeed experiencing this problem. Thus, I tried to put my feelings forward with careful explanations.

You will see that my body paragraphs are quite complex. That’s because this is not a simple topic. I don’t feel it’s possible to get a band 9 for Task Response without explaining just how complex the causes and solutions to crime are. It is not an easy issue to discuss.

You will see that I’ve avoided any bizarre vocabulary. Long-term readers of this blog will know that such an approach is not helpful. The best thing is to use the right word, whatever that may be. Aim for accuracy rather than obscurity.

About The Author

David S. Wills

David S. Wills is the author of Scientologist! William S. Burroughs and the 'Weird Cult' and the founder/editor of Beatdom literary journal. He lives and works in rural Cambodia and loves to travel. He has worked as an IELTS tutor since 2010, has completed both TEFL and CELTA courses, and has a certificate from Cambridge for Teaching Writing. David has worked in many different countries, and for several years designed a writing course for the University of Worcester. In 2018, he wrote the popular IELTS handbook, Grammar for IELTS Writing and he has since written two other books about IELTS. His other IELTS website is called IELTS Teaching.

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Why is There More Crime in Cities?

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Violent Crime Rates Are Surging. What Can Be Done To Reverse The Trend?

NPR's Steve Inskeep talks to Ronald Wright, a criminal justice expert and law professor at Wake Forest University, about why so many cities across the U.S. are experiencing a surge in violent crime.

Copyright © 2021 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

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Where are crime victimization rates higher: urban or rural areas?

Crime victimization rates are higher in urban than rural areas, but despite a rise in urban violent crime victimizations reported in 2021, rates have been falling for decades.

Updated on Mon, September 25, 2023 by the USAFacts Team

In 2021, crime victimization rates were higher in urban than rural areas. In urban settings, 24.5 out of 1,000 people aged 12 or older reported being the victims of violent crimes, and 157.5 reported being the victims of property crimes. In rural settings, those figures were 11.1 and 57.7, respectively.

How many people report being victims of crime?

In 2021, more than 4.5 million violent incidents involving victims ages 12 and older were self-reported in the US in the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). In the same year, 11.7 million property victimizations were also reported, according to the Criminal Victimization report from the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Despite this, US crime victimization rates have been on an overall downward trend since 1995 . The DOJ tracks crime victimization data by location, which shows how trends vary for urban, suburban, and rural areas. One common narrative is that urban crime victimization rates exceed those in rural areas — and this is true, based on the data.

Violent crime victimizations

In 2021, 4.6 million violent victimizations were reported across all locations in the NCVS. Violent crime refers to incidents of rape or sexual assault, robbery, aggravated assault, or simple assault.

This is an improvement relative to a few decades prior: in 1993, the rate of violent victimization was 79.8 per 1,000 people ages 12 and older; in 2021, the rate was 16.5. Further, during the five-year period from 2017–2021, the violent victimization rate decreased 20% from 20.6 to 16.5 incidents per 1,000 people.

Property crime victimizations

In 2021, there were 11.7 million property victimizations. Property crime includes burglary, trespassing, motor vehicle theft, and household theft. Between 2017–2021, property victimization decreased from 108.4 per 1,000 households to 90.3, a 17% decline.

What are the crime victimization rates in urban and rural areas?

In 2021, the rate of violent victimization in urban areas was 24.5 victimizations per 1,000 people. That’s more than double the rural area rate of 11.1.

The rate of property victimization in urban areas was 157.5 per 1,000 people. In rural areas, the rate was 57.7.

But not all crime is urban or rural. The DOJ report also tracks a third location: suburban areas. These are all census blocks not categorized as urban or rural. Those in suburban areas reported higher rates of victimization for both violent and property crime than rural areas, but lower rates than those in urban areas.

Crime victims by age

DOJ data shows that children ages 12–14 are most likely to report being the victims of violent crimes in both urban and rural areas.

How are urban and rural crime changing?

Despite the long-term trend of decreasing total crime victimization rates, one measure did increase between 2020 and 2021: rates of violent crime victimization in urban areas.

Urban crime victimization trends

By 2015, serious violent victimizations (rape/sexual assault, robbery, and aggravated assault) in urban areas had decreased by 74% compared with rates from 1995, according to a data trends report from the DOJ’s Office for Victims of Crime . Rates of simple assault and personal theft decreased by 75% and 74%, respectively.

When broken down by gender, both men and women were nearly twice as likely to experience violent victimization in urban areas than rural. In urban areas, women had a higher rate of victimization than men at 10.12 per 1,000 people, compared with seven per 1,000 for men.

Rural crime victimization trends

Over the same 20-year time period, serious violent victimizations in rural areas decreased by 67% and simple assaults dropped by 74%. Victimization rates for rural areas decreased by a smaller percentage than that in urban areas. However, the prior rate of victimization in rural areas was lower compared with urban ones. .

Women were also more likely to be victims of rural violent crime, but at a lower rate than urban areas: 4.6 per 1,000 people. The rate of rural violent victimization for men was 3.8.

Urban vs. rural crime victimization reporting

When it comes to reporting victimizations to police, people in rural areas do so less frequently than those in urban areas. In 2015, 19% of those who experienced rape or sexual assault in urban areas reported it to the police, versus 2% of those in rural areas. Twenty-five percent of aggravated assaults occurring in urban areas were reported, versus 8% in rural areas.

Where does this data come from?

The US Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics conducts an annual self-report survey, called the National Crime Victimization Survey , to collect data on the number of people who experience violent and property crime in the US as well as the specific type of crime experienced.

The survey uses the word “victimization” because the data comes from a survey of people self-reporting incidents in which they were victims of a crime. The resulting data is unique because respondents can report being the victim of a crime without having reported it to law enforcement.

Learn more about crime levels by city and state in the US, as well as how crime is measured , and get the data directly in your inbox by signing up for our email newsletter .

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What the data says about crime in the U.S.

A growing share of Americans say reducing crime should be a top priority for the president and Congress to address this year. Around six-in-ten U.S. adults (58%) hold that view today, up from 47% at the beginning of Joe Biden’s presidency in 2021.

We conducted this analysis to learn more about U.S. crime patterns and how those patterns have changed over time.

The analysis relies on statistics published by the FBI, which we accessed through the Crime Data Explorer , and the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), which we accessed through the  National Crime Victimization Survey data analysis tool .

To measure public attitudes about crime in the U.S., we relied on survey data from Pew Research Center and Gallup.

Additional details about each data source, including survey methodologies, are available by following the links in the text of this analysis.

With the issue likely to come up in this year’s presidential election, here’s what we know about crime in the United States, based on the latest available data from the federal government and other sources.

How much crime is there in the U.S.?

It’s difficult to say for certain. The  two primary sources of government crime statistics  – the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) – paint an incomplete picture.

The FBI publishes  annual data  on crimes that have been reported to law enforcement, but not crimes that haven’t been reported. Historically, the FBI has also only published statistics about a handful of specific violent and property crimes, but not many other types of crime, such as drug crime. And while the FBI’s data is based on information from thousands of federal, state, county, city and other police departments, not all law enforcement agencies participate every year. In 2022, the most recent full year with available statistics, the FBI received data from 83% of participating agencies .

BJS, for its part, tracks crime by fielding a  large annual survey of Americans ages 12 and older and asking them whether they were the victim of certain types of crime in the past six months. One advantage of this approach is that it captures both reported and unreported crimes. But the BJS survey has limitations of its own. Like the FBI, it focuses mainly on a handful of violent and property crimes. And since the BJS data is based on after-the-fact interviews with crime victims, it cannot provide information about one especially high-profile type of offense: murder.

All those caveats aside, looking at the FBI and BJS statistics side-by-side  does  give researchers a good picture of U.S. violent and property crime rates and how they have changed over time. In addition, the FBI is transitioning to a new data collection system – known as the National Incident-Based Reporting System – that eventually will provide national information on a much larger set of crimes , as well as details such as the time and place they occur and the types of weapons involved, if applicable.

Which kinds of crime are most and least common?

Property crime in the U.S. is much more common than violent crime. In 2022, the FBI reported a total of 1,954.4 property crimes per 100,000 people, compared with 380.7 violent crimes per 100,000 people.  

By far the most common form of property crime in 2022 was larceny/theft, followed by motor vehicle theft and burglary. Among violent crimes, aggravated assault was the most common offense, followed by robbery, rape, and murder/nonnegligent manslaughter.

BJS tracks a slightly different set of offenses from the FBI, but it finds the same overall patterns, with theft the most common form of property crime in 2022 and assault the most common form of violent crime.

How have crime rates in the U.S. changed over time?

Both the FBI and BJS data show dramatic declines in U.S. violent and property crime rates since the early 1990s, when crime spiked across much of the nation.

Using the FBI data, the violent crime rate fell 49% between 1993 and 2022, with large decreases in the rates of robbery (-74%), aggravated assault (-39%) and murder/nonnegligent manslaughter (-34%). It’s not possible to calculate the change in the rape rate during this period because the FBI  revised its definition of the offense in 2013 .

The FBI data also shows a 59% reduction in the U.S. property crime rate between 1993 and 2022, with big declines in the rates of burglary (-75%), larceny/theft (-54%) and motor vehicle theft (-53%).

Using the BJS statistics, the declines in the violent and property crime rates are even steeper than those captured in the FBI data. Per BJS, the U.S. violent and property crime rates each fell 71% between 1993 and 2022.

While crime rates have fallen sharply over the long term, the decline hasn’t always been steady. There have been notable increases in certain kinds of crime in some years, including recently.

In 2020, for example, the U.S. murder rate saw its largest single-year increase on record – and by 2022, it remained considerably higher than before the coronavirus pandemic. Preliminary data for 2023, however, suggests that the murder rate fell substantially last year .

How do Americans perceive crime in their country?

Americans tend to believe crime is up, even when official data shows it is down.

In 23 of 27 Gallup surveys conducted since 1993 , at least 60% of U.S. adults have said there is more crime nationally than there was the year before, despite the downward trend in crime rates during most of that period.

While perceptions of rising crime at the national level are common, fewer Americans believe crime is up in their own communities. In every Gallup crime survey since the 1990s, Americans have been much less likely to say crime is up in their area than to say the same about crime nationally.

Public attitudes about crime differ widely by Americans’ party affiliation, race and ethnicity, and other factors . For example, Republicans and Republican-leaning independents are much more likely than Democrats and Democratic leaners to say reducing crime should be a top priority for the president and Congress this year (68% vs. 47%), according to a recent Pew Research Center survey.

How does crime in the U.S. differ by demographic characteristics?

Some groups of Americans are more likely than others to be victims of crime. In the  2022 BJS survey , for example, younger people and those with lower incomes were far more likely to report being the victim of a violent crime than older and higher-income people.

There were no major differences in violent crime victimization rates between male and female respondents or between those who identified as White, Black or Hispanic. But the victimization rate among Asian Americans (a category that includes Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders) was substantially lower than among other racial and ethnic groups.

The same BJS survey asks victims about the demographic characteristics of the offenders in the incidents they experienced.

In 2022, those who are male, younger people and those who are Black accounted for considerably larger shares of perceived offenders in violent incidents than their respective shares of the U.S. population. Men, for instance, accounted for 79% of perceived offenders in violent incidents, compared with 49% of the nation’s 12-and-older population that year. Black Americans accounted for 25% of perceived offenders in violent incidents, about twice their share of the 12-and-older population (12%).

As with all surveys, however, there are several potential sources of error, including the possibility that crime victims’ perceptions about offenders are incorrect.

How does crime in the U.S. differ geographically?

There are big geographic differences in violent and property crime rates.

For example, in 2022, there were more than 700 violent crimes per 100,000 residents in New Mexico and Alaska. That compares with fewer than 200 per 100,000 people in Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Hampshire and Maine, according to the FBI.

The FBI notes that various factors might influence an area’s crime rate, including its population density and economic conditions.

What percentage of crimes are reported to police? What percentage are solved?

Most violent and property crimes in the U.S. are not reported to police, and most of the crimes that  are  reported are not solved.

In its annual survey, BJS asks crime victims whether they reported their crime to police. It found that in 2022, only 41.5% of violent crimes and 31.8% of household property crimes were reported to authorities. BJS notes that there are many reasons why crime might not be reported, including fear of reprisal or of “getting the offender in trouble,” a feeling that police “would not or could not do anything to help,” or a belief that the crime is “a personal issue or too trivial to report.”

Most of the crimes that are reported to police, meanwhile,  are not solved , at least based on an FBI measure known as the clearance rate . That’s the share of cases each year that are closed, or “cleared,” through the arrest, charging and referral of a suspect for prosecution, or due to “exceptional” circumstances such as the death of a suspect or a victim’s refusal to cooperate with a prosecution. In 2022, police nationwide cleared 36.7% of violent crimes that were reported to them and 12.1% of the property crimes that came to their attention.

Which crimes are most likely to be reported to police? Which are most likely to be solved?

Around eight-in-ten motor vehicle thefts (80.9%) were reported to police in 2022, making them by far the most commonly reported property crime tracked by BJS. Household burglaries and trespassing offenses were reported to police at much lower rates (44.9% and 41.2%, respectively), while personal theft/larceny and other types of theft were only reported around a quarter of the time.

Among violent crimes – excluding homicide, which BJS doesn’t track – robbery was the most likely to be reported to law enforcement in 2022 (64.0%). It was followed by aggravated assault (49.9%), simple assault (36.8%) and rape/sexual assault (21.4%).

The list of crimes  cleared  by police in 2022 looks different from the list of crimes reported. Law enforcement officers were generally much more likely to solve violent crimes than property crimes, according to the FBI.

The most frequently solved violent crime tends to be homicide. Police cleared around half of murders and nonnegligent manslaughters (52.3%) in 2022. The clearance rates were lower for aggravated assault (41.4%), rape (26.1%) and robbery (23.2%).

When it comes to property crime, law enforcement agencies cleared 13.0% of burglaries, 12.4% of larcenies/thefts and 9.3% of motor vehicle thefts in 2022.

Are police solving more or fewer crimes than they used to?

Nationwide clearance rates for both violent and property crime are at their lowest levels since at least 1993, the FBI data shows.

Police cleared a little over a third (36.7%) of the violent crimes that came to their attention in 2022, down from nearly half (48.1%) as recently as 2013. During the same period, there were decreases for each of the four types of violent crime the FBI tracks:

• Police cleared 52.3% of reported murders and nonnegligent homicides in 2022, down from 64.1% in 2013.
• They cleared 41.4% of aggravated assaults, down from 57.7%.
• They cleared 26.1% of rapes, down from 40.6%.
• They cleared 23.2% of robberies, down from 29.4%.

The pattern is less pronounced for property crime. Overall, law enforcement agencies cleared 12.1% of reported property crimes in 2022, down from 19.7% in 2013. The clearance rate for burglary didn’t change much, but it fell for larceny/theft (to 12.4% in 2022 from 22.4% in 2013) and motor vehicle theft (to 9.3% from 14.2%).

Note: This is an update of a post originally published on Nov. 20, 2020.

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John Gramlich is an associate director at Pew Research Center .

Fewer than 1% of federal criminal defendants were acquitted in 2022

Before release of video showing tyre nichols’ beating, public views of police conduct had improved modestly, violent crime is a key midterm voting issue, but what does the data say, u.s. public divided over whether people convicted of crimes spend too much or too little time in prison, what we know about the increase in u.s. murders in 2020, most popular.

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20 Strategies for Reducing Crime in Cities

John k. roman, october 10, 2023.

Complements, not substitutes, to policing

It is easy to despair of crime in cities. But there is much to be learned from recent history. Two decades of research on the almost everywhere, almost all-at-once, Great American Crime Decline of the 1990s —  when violence in America dropped by half in a single decade — finds dozens of evidence-based reasons why crime declined . And overwhelmingly, that research finds that the most effective crime-fighting tools were not explicitly about fighting crime. 

In the 1990s, crime declined, among other reasons , because more people had access to Medicaid , better medicines for behavioral health became available, less cash was in circulation and fewer people were poisoned by environmental toxins . And, more evidence-based programs and practices were used in schools , workforce development and public health . Yes, mass incarceration and new policing strategies played a role, but the strongest evidence suggests they explain perhaps one-quarter of the crime decline . 

What these explanations have in common is strong empirical evidence and a focus on classical prevention based on the idea that supporting people and strengthening communities is the surest path to widespread safety. There are hundreds of solutions — market-based solutions, medical solutions, structural solutions and behavioral nudges — that can meaningfully reduce the risk of crime and violence without expanding the criminal justice system. Instead of responding to problems, these solutions reduce risk factors and risk conditions and promote resiliency, stopping crime and violence before they happen.  

But prevention does not work a la carte and there is no silver bullet, only the hard work of gradual improvements and the challenge of waiting for the longer-term positive outcomes to emerge. Quantity has a quality all its own, and the more of these strategies that are employed, the better the outcomes.

In that spirit, here are 20 crime-reducing strategies that strengthen people and communities and are supported by solid social-science research to reduce crime. The list is here to draw you in.: There are more evidence-based approaches than even this, and even more promising programs being tested. We do not have to settle for 20th-century criminal justice. The vast breadth of available prevention policies and programs should vanquish any one-dimensional view of crime reduction. 

A call for non-criminal justice solutions is not a call to defund the police in disguise. These are complements to, not substitutes for, law-enforcement-led strategies. There are numerous evidence-based law enforcement-focused mechanisms that should be a critical part of any public safety proposal. But, if the arc from Michael Brown to George Floyd taught America anything, it is that we must move beyond law enforcement working in isolation to find justice and safety.

The 20 Strategies 1. Help Victims of Crime  There is far too little support for victims of crime, even though it is the most obvious place to start. Prior victimization — of a person or a place — is the top predictor of future victimization . Supporting people who have been victimized from being victimized again — through social supports and target - hardening — has enormous potential for positive change.   2. Reduce Demand for Law Enforcement A central reason why law enforcement does not prevent more crime or solve more crimes is that they are too busy doing things that accomplish neither objective. If the police were called less often for unproductive reasons, there would be less under-policing — and less over-policing as well. If cities and towns set the explicit goal of having people call the police less often, law enforcement would be more efficient at taking on the tasks that remain. 3. Fixing Distressed Spaces There is a wide body of evidence that shows that places poison people more routinely than people poison places. Crime does not result from “areas” of the “inner city” being high risk, but rather from a few very small, very bad places . Concentrated efforts to improve contagious places can build resiliency across neighborhoods.  4. Making Crime Attractors Less Appealing  Certain places attract and generate crime — schools , the built environment and bars being at the top of the list. More often than not, careful planning and implementation of best practices in situational crime prevention can reduce the harms they unintentionally generate and, in the case of schools and transit, unlock their potential for guardianship. 5. Scientific Supports for Law Enforcement  Police in the United States would benefit from increased reliance on civilians in two realms: translating scientific evidence into practice , and increasing their reliance on civilian analysts to study local policing practices . In particular, if law enforcement was aided by more civilian analysts who were better trained , crime would be reduced while the footprint of policing was reduced.   6. Improving the Job Market and Job Training The relationship between jobs and crime is far more complex than in the popular imagination — higher national-level unemployment rates, for example, do not seem to increase violence . But targeted programs can have large effects. Integrating social and emotional skills training into employment training for young people has solid evidence of effectiveness as does employment planning for people returning from prison and transitional jobs for high risk people .  7. Facilitate Neighborhood Non-Profits In his excellent book ”Uneasy Peace,” Professor Patrick Sharkey reports on a study that found that for each 10 additional nonprofits in a given city, the violent crime rate is reduced by 14% (in the study period between 1990 and 2013). It should come as no surprise that access to more and better services has positive effects. Local government can aid the development of these local assets by providing funding for hyper-local community projects.  8. Make Jails and Prison Less Criminogenic We have overwhelmingly designed our jails and prisons to prevent people from gaining the skills to work and maintain their sobriety when they go home , and cut them off from their most crime-reducing assets, their family and friends. Small investments in humanity yield large returns when jails and prisons are not designed to produce more crime. 9. Better Prepare People to Return Home from Prison People returning from prison need specific supports to facilitate a successful transition – 82% of people released from prison are rearrested within 10 years. And the solutions are simple — leaving facilities with an ID , prescriptions , a place to stay , a way to get started . A goal without a plan is a wish — people should leave prison with a plan and the supports to implement that plan. 10. Fund Community-Based Violence Interruption A growing body of evidence finds that credible messengers — individuals with lived experience — coupled with psychosocial services can prevent retaliatory violence and repeat victimization. But this is a new sector and will need time and space to learn and grow. 11. Use Technology to Reduce Violence Professor Graham Farrell argues convincingly that increases in security technology (such as engine immobilizers and cameras) in the 1990s were the only universal explanation for the universal decline in crime. There is much more that can be done using technology without imposing on civil liberties: text message reminders for court and probation appearances , databases to maintain records on police officers with histories of abuse and anti-crime features on ordinary consumer products are just the start.  12. Tackle the Causes and Consequences of Poverty  Poverty drives crime and violence in numerous ways beyond a simple lack of income, through weakened social bonds . A number of important policies have been successfully piloted but not fully implemented by state and local government. These are the big-ticket items — child poverty tax credits , whole-school anti-bullying programs , expanding Medicaid — that have the biggest crime reduction benefits. But the benefits outweigh the costs for dozens of policies and programs .  13. Fix Long-Standing Problems  Problems often persist because they have high costs, a lack of immediacy and declining political constituency — but these perpetual problems are often the key risk condition causing crime in a place to persist. Unhealthy homes , lead paint and pipes , and under-resourced foster care all promote crime. 14. Shorten the Reach of the Criminal Justice System Too many financial burdens are imposed on people with low risk to public safety, creating a cycle of debt and incarceration , the latter which increases violence through stigma , criminal capital accumulation and a disruption of social bonds . Removing those conditions by clearing old warrants and convictions , reducing toxic fines and fees and ending poverty traps would prevent crime. 15. Help Those with Substance-Use Disorders  In the 1990s and 2000s, with trepidation, the justice system began treating substance-use disorders as a disease rather than a crime. Expansion in the broadest of these interventions – problem-solving courts and in-prison substance use treatment — largely ended more than a decade ago. Many extremely useful ideas have been piloted — trauma-informed care , motivational interviewing , treating withdrawal in prison — but few were ever taken fully to scale. Those foundations are ready-made to build upon.  16. Support Programs for High-Risk Young People and Families A lot of criminology is concerned with bending the criminal trajectory curve — to keep adolescents from accelerating their delinquency or failing to desist as they age — and a huge body of scholarship has contributed to numerous model programs. From prenatal programs , to social and emotional learning , to programs for high-risk adolescents , there is a tremendous base of knowledge. 17. Education Improving education is its own crime-reducing category, but schools can facilitate crime reduction outside of schools. Reducing food insecurity , humanizing discipline and improving the safety of the school commute benefit everyone.  18. Housing Like education, housing is its own category beyond the scope of this essay. But there are housing solutions with specific crime-reducing benefits: permanent, supportive housing ; transitional housing for young people leaving homelessness; and housing programs specifically for people who cycle through emergency services .  19. Policy and Law There are any number of laws and regulations that could be tweaked to meaningfully reduce crime and victimization. For example, higher taxes that specifically target the overuse of criminogenic products like guns and alcohol have been shown to reduce excess demand.  20. Stop the Proliferation of Firearms  The link between firearms and violence is ironclad — the more guns, the more crime. More guns explain much of the difference in rates of violence between the U.S and peer nations. Fixing violence in the U.S. without addressing the gun problem, which is to say ensuring fewer potentially dangerous people have easy access to weapons, is embracing half-measures. Next steps   The next step in strengthening people and communities is for the evidence-making industry to think beyond one intervention at a time. What we need is classical policy analysis that considers the choices faced by lawmakers in the presence of budget constraints. That means embracing cost-effective evidence-based prevention over expensive remediation, and programs that lift as many people as possible and leave behind far fewer than we do today. We need to embrace science and evidence, to think holistically and comprehensively and to stop thinking of crime and violence as a problem that can only be addressed through police and prisons.  In medicine, we learn that our first line of defense is a catchall triage — some exercise, a better diet and more sleep are the cure for a vast array of simple problems before they become serious. In economics, we learn that simple nudges can motivate better choices. In public health, we can learn that a small early change in trend and trajectory today has enormous long-term benefits. All of these lessons await discovery in the public safety sector.  John K. Roman is a senior fellow at NORC at the University of Chicago. He also serves as the co-Director of the National Prevention Science Coalition. Up next...

To prevent crime, respect the role of self-control.

Alex R. Piquero

Why Crime Is Down in America's Cities

Yesterday, the Financial Times ran an op ed piece of mine about the mysterious downward trend in crime. While this drop is a welcome development -- and very possibly a bellwether of even more positive changes in our society -- it poses a vexing challenge to professional explainers. What follows is a longer, more detailed, and more statistics-laden exploration of why crime rates are falling.

Almost three years into the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, with massive unemployment and pessimism rife, America's crime rates are falling and no one--not our pundits, policemen, or politicians, our professors or city planners--can tell us why. As I  wrote about here , there were 5.5 percent fewer murders, forcible rapes, robberies and aggravated assaults reported in 2010 than in 2009, according to the most recent edition of the FBI's  Uniform Crime Report ; property crimes fell by 2.8 percent over the same period and reported arsons dropped by 8.3 percent.

And the drop was steepest in America's biggest cities--which are still popularly believed to be cauldrons of criminality. "While cities and suburbs alike are much safer today than in 1990," notes a recent  report  by the Brookings Institution, "central cities--the big cities that make up the hubs of the 100 largest metro areas--benefitted the most from declining crime rates. Among suburban communities, older higher-density suburbs saw crime drop at a faster pace than newer, lower-density emerging and exurban communities on the metropolitan fringe."

An essay in  The Economist  featured a graphic which charts the arc of American crime rates since the 1960s. Its caption poses the question that is on everyone's lips:

Some explanations evoke Sherlock Holmes' "dog that didn't bark." When crime rates first began to fall in the 1990s, Steven Levitt and John Donohue III  argued  that legalized abortion was responsible, since unwanted children would have been more likely to grow up to be criminals - a finding that was not only wildly controversial but has been met with substantial challenge. Research by economist  Jessica Wolpaw Reyes  find attributes a significant proportion of the decline in violent crime to children's reduced exposure to lead.

Others suggest that America's astronomical incarceration rate--the highest in the world--is responsible, though that begs the question why countries that don't incarcerate their citizens at anything like the same rate suffer from less crime than the US does. It's disquieting to think that what would seem to be an unalloyed social good--less crime--might have been brought about in part by what many believe to be a social disaster: America's draconian, unequally enforced drug laws.

Still, it is confounding that crime would decline as economic conditions worsen. My own analysis, conducted with my  Martin Prosperity Institute  colleague Charlotta Mellander, turns up no statistical associations between crime and either the level or the change in the level of unemployment across metros, or between crime and the level of income inequality. There does seem to be a modest relationship between the absolute poverty rate and crime. Our analysis turned up an association of .19 between crime and the percent of population below the poverty line. But it has weakened substantially over the past two or three decades, according to the Brookings study.

So too has the relationship between crime and race. From evening news headlines to crime shows on TV, popular culture underlines the propinquity between crime and race Our analysis turned up modest correlation (.37) between crime and the share of population that is black. But again, Brookings Institute report assembles powerful evidence to show that the relationship has been weakening. "The association between crime and community characteristics--like the proportion of the population that is black, Hispanic, poor, or foreign-born--diminished considerably over time," notes the study. "The strength of the relationship between the share of black residents and property crime decreased by half between 1990 and 2008, while the association between the share of Hispanic residents and violent crime all but disappeared."

In the popular imagination, crime is frequently associated with big, densely populated cities. Here again, we can separate fact from myth.  Primary cities and older high-density suburbs exhibited the largest decreases in crime between 1990 and 2008, according to the Brookings study. And the gap between city and suburban violent crime narrowed in two-thirds of the nation's 100 largest metro areas. Our own analysis turns up no association whatsoever between metro size or metro density and the overall level of crime, though we do find a modest correlation (.25) between density and violent crime.

In a  thoughtful essay  in the  Wall Street Journal , the distinguished political scientist and urban crime expert James Q. Wilson hit hard at strictly economistic explanations, suggesting that deeper changes in American culture can better account for the mystery. "The cultural argument" he writes, can help explain not only the current drop in crime, but also "the Great Depression's fall in crime and the explosion of crime during the sixties. In the first period, on this view, people took self-control seriously; in the second, self-expression--at society's cost--became more prevalent." My former Carnegie Mellon University colleague, the distinguished criminologist  Alfred Blumstein , proposes an "Obama effect," in which young black males' increased optimism about their futures makes them more likely to refrain from violence.

But the key factor, as it turns out, lies in the growing racial, ethnic, and demographic diversity of our cities and metro areas. Our analysis found that the Hispanic share of the population is  negatively  associated with urban crime. Crime also fell as the percentage of the population that is non-white and the percentage that is gay increased. And of all the variables in our analysis, the one that is most consistently  negatively  associated with crime is a place's percentage of foreign-born residents. Not only did we find a negative correlation (-.36) between foreign-born share and crime in general, the pattern held across all of the many, various types of crime - from murder and arson to burglary and car theft. 

The Brookings study also finds evidence of a substantial shift in the connection between foreign-born residents and crime. While foreign-born share was positively associated with crime in 1990 and 2000, that relationship had disappeared by 2008. The foreign-born share of population now shows no relationship to property crime, and a negative relationship to violent crime. The pattern is most pronounced for primary cities and inner-ring suburbs, the Brookings study found, but not for lower-density suburbs and ex-urbs.

It might be hard to wrap your mind around this--especially with all the demagoguery about immigration. But the numbers tell a different story than our alarmist pundits and politicians do. "Since 1990, all types of communities within the country's largest metro areas have become more diverse," Elizabeth Kneebone, one of the authors of the Brookings report,  wrote  in  The New Republic . "Crime fell fastest in big cities and high-density suburbs that were poorer, more minority, and had higher crime rates to begin with. At the same time, all kinds of suburbs saw their share of poor, minority, and foreign-born residents increase. As suburbia diversified, crime rates fell." Along with their entrepreneurial energy and their zeal to succeed, immigrants are good neighbors--cultural and economic factors that militate against criminal behavior, and not just in their own enclaves but in surrounding communities as well.

One additional factor bears on this. Our analysis also turns up a consistent negative correlation between crime and the overall level of city happiness. It makes intuitive sense that a low-crime city would be a happy city; still, it's worth pointing out that the happiness measure (which comes from Gallup surveys) is associated not just with overall crime but with almost every type of crime across the board. 

This is somewhat striking in an analysis where associations between crime and key social and economic variables are hard to find. More to the point, the Gallup research identifies openness to diversity as being one of the two most important factors that shape city happiness and community satisfaction across the board.

America's declining crime rates are cause for celebration, even if we can't completely explain the phenomenon. The fact that diversity appears to play such a signal role in the trend--something that most Americans regard as a moral and economic good in its own right-- makes it all-the-more satisfying.

Image Credit: Flickr / dsb nola

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What’s behind rising violent crimes in the U.S., and how they can be reduced

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• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/whats-behind-rising-violent-crimes-in-the-u-s-and-how-they-can-be-reducedspike-in-violence

Recent shootings in New York City have spotlighted a troubling rise in gun violence and homicide across the country. Amna Nawaz reports on why violent crime has increased and how cities can prevent it.

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Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors.

Judy Woodruff:

Recent shootings in New York City have spotlighted a troubling rise in gun violence and homicide across the country.

Amna Nawaz has our report on why violent crime has increased and how cities can prevent it.

Amna Nawaz:

A grim start to the year in New York City, with residents across the boroughs reeling from a series of attacks, in Times Square, a woman pushed to death on the subway tracks, in the Bronx, an 11-month-old baby shot in the face, and, in Harlem, two police officers shot to death while on duty.

It's sent newly inaugurated Mayor Eric Adams, a former NYPD captain, to prayer vigils, roundtables and to the center of a national debate on gun violence and public safety.

Eric Adams (D), Mayor of New York: We need Washington to join us and act now to stop the flow of guns in New York City and cities like New York.

The issue is resonating nationwide. Over the weekend, an officer was wounded in Washington, D.C., and a deputy killed in Houston, Texas.

Ted Heap, Harris County, Texas, Precinct 5 Constable: We cannot have people like this on our streets.

The overall picture of violent crime in America right now is complicated.

A new report by the Council on Criminal Justice tracks that. In 2021, the homicide rate rose by 5 percent, an increase, but by a much smaller margin than in 2020, when homicides rose by 29 percent. And these numbers are still only about half the rate during the nation's peak in the early 1990s.

Still it was top of mind for city leaders, who gathered for the national mayors conference in Washington, D.C., last week. There, Republicans and Democrats alike endorsed investing in police departments, like Miami Mayor Francis Suarez:

Francis Suarez (R), Mayor of Miami, Florida: As we have invested in our police departments, we saw a shocking correlation. Crime went down.

And President Joe Biden:

President Joe Biden:

We shouldn't be cutting funding for police departments. I have proposed increasing funding.

Back in New York on Monday, Mayor Adams echoed that message.

Eric Adams:

We will not surrender our city to the violent few.

Laying out a blueprint to end gun violence, to empower community anti-violence groups, expand programs for youth jobs and mental health, harsher sentences on gun trafficking, and an increased police presence on the streets.

The NYPD is our first line of defense against gun violence. We will make new efforts to strengthen and reinforce it, while continuing our mission to involve the community.

That includes bring back a remodeled version of plainclothes units, the teams behind a number of the city's most notorious police shootings, disbanded amid calls for reform in 2020. Adams said he'd ensure they didn't repeat past mistakes.

We're not looking to be heavy-handed. But we're not looking to be dangerous to our city. And I'm going to look for and strike that right balance.

New Yorkers can expect to see change on the streets in the coming weeks, a sign of one city's approach to violent crime.

To understand why violence is up nationwide and what policies can address this, I'm joined by Thomas Abt. He is the chair of the Council on Criminal Justice's Violent Crime Working Group, which studies evidence-based strategies for public safety.

Thomas Abt, welcome to the "NewsHour." Thanks for being here.

So, as we mentioned there, the violent crime rates are not what we saw in the 1990s, but those increases, they show up. People see that and they feel that in their community.

So, what do we know is behind those increases? What is driving them?

Thomas Abt, Council on Criminal Justice: Sure. It is a pleasure to be with you, Amna, today.

Basically, it is hard to tell what drives crime trends, but the experts broadly agree on three main reasons. First, it is the pandemic. As people know, the pandemic has placed everyone under incredible pressure, but, in particular, it has placed disproportionate pressure on poor communities of color, precisely where community gun violence concentrates.

The second major cause is, in fact, these guns. We saw record sales of guns in 2020, continuing to 2021. And, unfortunately, some recent ATF data shows that the — quote, unquote — "time to crime," meaning the time illegally purchased gun needs to funnel through the gray and black markets into the hands of the criminal, has shortened considerably.

And, in fact, what we're seeing on the streets of our cities is that more illegal guns are being recovered, despite the fact that there have been fewer arrests.

The final thing that's driving these crime trends is the social unrest that followed the brutal murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. And what that incident and other incidents like it did is, it drove a wedge between cops and the communities they serve.

And what we're seeing is, we're seeing police alienated from communities and communities alienated from police. So, we're seeing less proactive investigation from police. And we're seeing less cooperation in some of the impact — in most impacted communities.

So, let me ask you what you have seen so far, as mayors are responding. We just saw the New York City mayor, Adams, there talking about how he'd like to respond to the increase in crime there, more police on the streets, but also empowering some of those community programs you were mentioning.

We actually spoke with a gentleman in New York who works with a crime — or, rather, a violence reduction program in the neighborhood of Brownsville. His name is Anthony Newerls.

And here's what he told us about something they tried recently.

Anthony Newerls, Brownsville In, Violence Out:

We asked the police department to let us police our own community. So it was a community-based-led resources.

Knowing the needs of the community, knowing that they have housing issues, mental health issues, summonses and warrants and food, we bought resources out for a week straight from 12:00 p.m. to 800 p.m. And not one, not one violent incident took place that week.

So, Thomas, Anthony saying they actually pulled back on policing, and they saw crime go down.

Is that an approach more cities should be trying?

Thomas Abt:

I think what cities need to do, and, frankly, what I think Mayor Adams is doing, is try to strike the right balance.

It's important to understand that police are essential to crime fighting, particularly fighting against the most serious forms of crime, such as violence.

At the same time, police are necessary, but not sufficient. So we also need partners for those police, including community groups like the one we just heard about. And so that's really the important thing.

Unfortunately, across the country, far too often, we're having sort of an either/or conversation. Either it's the police or it's these community groups. You're either for the police or you're against the police. And the science says, we actually need both.

So, what about this kind of knee-jerk reaction we see in a lot of places, right? People see crime numbers go up, and the immediate response from leaders who want to appear responsive and assertive is to say we're going to answer with more police.

We know, even with all the conversation around police reform, that more cities are spending a bigger part of their budget on police departments in the last year. So, how do you encourage those leaders to make sure there's a mixed response; it's not just responding with police; these community programs are also getting funding?

Police funding as a share of overall state, local and even federal budgets is remarkably consistent. And I wouldn't expect to see a major increase this year. But what I would say is that it's very important to understand that it's not necessarily more police that we need or less please. It's the right kind of policing.

Serious gun violence is remarkably concentrated. It's concentrated in every city among a surprisingly small number of people and a small number of places often known as micro-locations or hot spots. And so, yes, we need police in those places. But, no, we don't need to return to some of the practices that — of mass arrest, mass incarceration that left us with really some of the highest levels of imprisonment in the world.

That is Thomas Abt, chair of the Violent Crime Working Group, joining us tonight.

Thank you so much for your time.

Pleasure to be with you.

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Home — Essay Samples — An Overview Of The High Crime Rates Inside The US Cities

An Overview of The High Crime Rates Inside The Us Cities

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Published: Nov 22, 2018

Words: 1046 | Pages: 2 | 6 min read

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Task 2 IELTS Writing Sample: Youth Crime - Reasons and Solutions

by Toshpulatov Lenur (Termiz, Surkhandarya, Uzbekistan)

"They think that, there must be another way" = don’t use a comma after ‘that’. You make this mistake many times. "recent figures there is an increase in violent" = should be ‘there has been…’. Use present perfect for something that started in the past and is still going on now. Second of all / Third of all = you can’t say this, only ‘first of all’ is possible.

"replace severe punishments than panleties are  such as, financial and and even being in prison"

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Big Cities vs. Small Cities: Compare and Contrast Essay

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
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Big cities and small cities both have advantages based on lifestyle, and their location. This means that when an individual chooses to live in either a big city or a small city, he/she foregoes certain advantages, while at the same time attaining others. Small cities are characterized by a scarce population and a relatively simple life. On the contrary, life in big cities is typified by commotions and impersonal relationships. All over the globe, there are big cities and small cities. According to Fischer those who prefer big cities do so because of the facilities that are found in these cities (179). The purpose of this paper is to compare and contrast big cities and small cities.

One of the obvious similarities between big cities and small cities is that both have amenities like electricity, good roads, and running water. These amenities make individuals have similar experiences regardless of whether they live in a big or a small city. In addition, these amenities are the main factor that differentiates small and big cities from rural areas. Another key similarity between small and big cities according to Fischer is that both of them have streets, which residents use to locate their homes (80). Cities, whether big or small, normally have a population occupying them; a factor that enables residents to have a normal life.

Another major similarity between big cities and small cities is that both of them have a relatively large concentration of facilities such as hospitals and schools. This provides city residents with a wide variety of choices when it comes to treatment and education. Both big cities and small cities have recreational facilities like entertainment venues, parks, and art centers like museums (Fischer 82-90). Lastly, the public transport system is a common feature in both big and small cities.

One of the main differences between big cities and small cities can be seen in terms of the cost of living. Most commodities, ranging from food staffs to houses are expensive in big cities as compared to small cities (Fischer 233). For example, the cost of acquiring a house in a big city, and furnishing it, is more expensive compared to a small city. When it comes to modern necessities of life, big cities provide more options to the residents. This is because in big cities there are more convenient stores, electronic shops, and supermarkets than in small cities.

A more visible difference between small and big cities can be seen in terms of buildings. Big cities are characterized by huge spectacular buildings that are not found in small towns. The huge buildings in big cities are normally meant to accommodate the large population in these cities. Another difference between big and small cities mentioned by Fischer is that big cities offer a wide range of cultural exposure and entertainment options as opposed to small cities (234). One more visible difference can be seen in public transport. Big cities have more traffic compared to small cities, and the transport systems are usually efficient. However, residents of big cities often have to put up with cumbersome traffic.

The differences between small and big cities can also be seen in terms of nature and warmth. In small cities, it is possible to enjoy nature and friendly relationships as opposed to big cities where story-buildings, technology, and industries have interfered with nature. In small cities, people are relatively friendly and may smile at strangers, which is very rare in big cities. This is because people living in big cities are normally consumed by their work. Fischer also maintains that large populations in big cities make cooperation between people difficult (235). Tranquility is also a factor that shows the difference between big cities and small cities (Fischer 236). Many young people normally believe in the notion that big cities are exciting and full of fun, while small cities are boring. On the contrary, older people hold the view that big cities are noisy and annoying, while small cities are comfortable and calm.

Another difference between big and small cities can be seen in terms of crime. Big cities normally have a higher crime rate compared to small cities (Fischer 236). This can be attributed to the presence of many young people who migrate to big cities in search of opportunities but end up idle. Small towns, on the other hand, are not a preferred choice of destination by young immigrants; hence, high crime rates and criminal gangs are not common in small cities. Most large cities are multicultural and offer a variety when it comes to dining. Residents of big cities can have different meals from various cultures. On the other hand, small cities may have few restaurants offering limited types of foods.

In terms of prices and quality of food, small cities have been known to offer fresh produce, and at a lower price as compared to large cities. But the prices of other commodities are normally higher in small cities due to the absence of megastores that offer significant discounts. Fischer has argued that those big cities are driven by a sense of order, while the feeling of belonging to the same community predominate small cities (238). For example, traffic rules are strictly enforced in big cities, while residents of small cities never care that much about these rules; and trying to enforce these rules may be met with resentment.

Big cities and small cities also have environmental differences. The environment in a big city is more polluted as compared to that of a small city. This is brought about by the presence of several large industries and the enormous waste generated by the residents of big cities. In addition, a small city is quieter than a big city a factor that enables residents of a small city to have a piece of mind. Another difference between a big city and a small one is that residents of s small city can have enough time to rest because they are relatively free compared to their counterparts in big cities (Fischer 230-241). When it comes to specialized services like receiving treatment from great doctors and surgeons, people in big cities have more access to these services than residents of a small city.

The differences and similarities between big cities and small cities can be viewed as points on a continuum. This is because these similarities and differences keep on changing, which makes it difficult to draw a clear boundary between them. Big cities possess elements of small cities and small cities also have some features of big cities. Cities, whether big or small, are normally characterized by modern structures and urban lifestyles. The difference is that these urban features are more pronounced in big cities.

Works cited

Fischer, Claude S. To Dwell Among Friends: Personal Networks in Town and City . E-book ed., University of Chicago Press, 2024.

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In many cities crime is increasing. Why do you think this is happening? What can governments do to help reduce crime levels? Give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your own knowledge or experience.

Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Writing9 with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Include an introduction and conclusion

A conclusion is essential for IELTS writing task 2. It is more important than most people realise. You will be penalised for missing a conclusion in your IELTS essay.

The easiest paragraph to write in an essay is the conclusion paragraph. This is because the paragraph mostly contains information that has already been presented in the essay – it is just the repetition of some information written in the introduction paragraph and supporting paragraphs.

The conclusion paragraph only has 3 sentences:

• Restatement of thesis
• Prediction or recommendation

To summarize, a robotic teacher does not have the necessary disciple to properly give instructions to students and actually works to retard the ability of a student to comprehend new lessons. Therefore, it is clear that the idea of running a classroom completely by a machine cannot be supported. After thorough analysis on this subject, it is predicted that the adverse effects of the debate over technology-driven teaching will always be greater than the positive effects, and because of this, classroom teachers will never be substituted for technology.

Start your conclusion with a linking phrase. Here are some examples:

• In conclusion
• To conclude
• To summarize
• In a nutshell

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• Urbanization
• overcrowding
• unemployment
• viable option
• lack of education
• criminal activities
• substance abuse
• job creation
• effective policing
• community-focused
• social services
• addiction treatment
• mental health support
• data analysis
• crime hotspots
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A college asked its graduates to give a speech to current students about their professional careers and future opportunities. You would like to participate. Write a letter and say What do you want to talk about? Why do you think students will be interested in it? Suggest a suitable date and time for your speech?

In some cities public parks and open spaces are being changed into gardens where local resident can grow their own fruit and vegetables. do the advantages outweigh the disadvantages, international tourism is now more common than ever before. some feel that this is a positive trend, while others do not.what are your opinions on this, in many countries, people now wear western-style dresses such as suits and jeans rather than traditional clothing. why is this is this a positive or negative development, nowadays environmental problems are too big to be managed by individual persons or individual countries. in other words, it is an international problem. to what extent do you agree or disagree..

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Ielts writing task 2 sample 227 - in many cities crime is increasing, ielts writing task 2/ ielts essay:, in many cities crime is increasing. why do you think this is happening what can governments do to help reduce crime levels.

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What Is New York’s Migrant Crime Rate?

We have no idea.

Two Sundays ago, two shootings, apparently related, claimed the lives of two men; a third is fighting for his life. The shootings took place just outside a migrant shelter for nearly 800 single adults that has been operating since April, and the three victims are migrants, sources told the New York Post . This double murder, possibly committed by migrant gang members, is just the latest in a series of high-profile violent migrant crimes in the city. But what’s the actual migrant crime rate —both for perpetrators and for victims? We don’t know, and New York City mayor Eric Adams, despite his tough rhetoric on migrants committing crimes, hasn’t moved to direct the NYPD to collect and disseminate such data.

This recent double homicide isn’t the first such killing. In May, one migrant fatally stabbed  another outside a Harlem migrant shelter. In January, a similar dispute between migrant men, this one at the Randall’s Island mass shelter, resulted in one man killed . In June, a migrant fatally shot  two residents of a Bronx building after they objected to his illegally squatting there. Non-fatal crimes are too numerous to mention, among them, also all just from this year, the June forcible rape  of a girl in Queens, the June nonfatal shooting  of two police officers (also in Queens), the February shooting of a tourist during a shoplifting attempt in Times Square, multiple violent robberies , and shoplifting (without shootings) that commonly goes unreported  to police.

Do these anecdotes add up to a higher or lower rate of migrant crime, violent and otherwise, compared with the local average? There is no way to know because these stories represent only partial data. The NYPD doesn’t report crime  by immigration status, doing its part to keep New York a “sanctuary city.” 

Any concern that migrants are pushing up crime is met with bromides. Historically, immigrant crime rates are lower than the national average, the experts tell us . New York absorbed some half a million  unauthorized immigrants between the early 1980s and 2019, and yet for three of those nearly four decades, city crime rates and visible disorder fell . Finally, New York City felony crime is more or less flat since 2022, when the current wave of migrants began arriving . 

None of these arguments is comforting. Biden-era migration is not like the previous immigration wave to New York City. There are the numbers: the city estimates that 200,000 people  have arrived in little more than two years, with 65,000 of them currently in city shelters. We’ve thus crammed well more than a decade’s worth of recent historical migration into two years. Then there is the economic environment: neither New York’s economy nor its non-migrant population is growing quickly, as it did between the 1980s and 2019, and so migrants are largely competing with each other and driving down wages in the city’s underground economy for restaurant work, construction work, domestic labor, and peddling.

Then, there’s the environment of disorder that absorbs new migrants. A young male migrant who arrived in, say, 2010 might observe: police and prosecutors more or less enforce the law. Therefore, it’s not wise to smoke pot in public, engage in small-scale thievery, or ride a bike (never mind a motorized bike) the wrong way down the sidewalk. Today, it doesn’t take more than a few days in New York City to observe that anything goes; young migrant men can blast their music outside the Row Hotel in Times Square at all hours of the night or hire a trafficked prostitute  on Queens’s Roosevelt Avenue without having to worry much about repercussions.

This environment of lawlessness is particularly attractive to one subset of today’s migrants: gang members from Venezuela. The NYPD suspects that the alleged perpetrators of several recent high-profile crimes, including the Queens cop shooting, were members of Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua gang, which is engaged in people smuggling, human-labor trafficking, drug trafficking, and fencing stolen goods. As the Financial Times reported  last month regarding Chile, a generally safe country, Venezuelan migrants “have fundamentally changed the nature of crime” there, turning “fashionable” downtown properties into sex-trafficking brothels, among other organized illegal endeavors, and enforcing their territories with violence.

Finally, the city’s flat-ish crime numbers aren’t much reassurance, either. Yes, in 2024 (through mid-July), felony crime is 2.1 percent below last year’s levels, and petit larceny is down 2.2 percent. But crime, violent and otherwise, remains significantly above 2019 levels. Felony crime is 35 percent above levels of five years ago (historical petit-larceny data are temporarily unavailable). Covid-era dislocations no longer work as an excuse, as they could between 2020 and 2022; New York’s jobs total has recovered back to 2019 levels (if anemically), kids are back in school, and mental-health care has resumed. A disorganized New York City government trying to enforce laws in an environment of greater leniency dictated by state-level reforms is partly to blame, but only an ideologue would discount any potential migrant role.

We wouldn’t have to speculate if the Adams administration would give us some data. And no, the mayor isn’t entirely hamstrung  by the city council’s sanctuary city policies, which prohibit most cooperation between local government and federal immigration officials. Police officers can ask a suspect’s immigration status when investigating a crime beyond being illegally in the country. They can inquire whether a suspect lives, or has recently lived, in a migrant shelter, a good indication of whether someone is a migrant. The city can also investigate whether a crime suspect had any ties to New York that pre-date 2022. For now, the NYPD could periodically report such data in the aggregate, so as not to run afoul of city council edicts governing the confidentiality of such data (though it is not absolute).

Migrant crime may be higher than the local average—or it might be lower. How could anyone object simply to trying to find out? Good policy is based on data and facts, not suppositions and headlines.

Nicole Gelinas  is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of  City Journal .

Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images

City Journal is a publication of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research (MI), a leading free-market think tank. Are you interested in supporting the magazine? As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, donations in support of MI and City Journal are fully tax-deductible as provided by law (EIN #13-2912529).

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UK riots latest: Couple who went to bingo then joined riot jailed; PM to hold third emergency meeting

It's a busy day in court as rioters are jailed over violence that has rocked the UK for nearly two weeks. Sir Keir Starmer has hailed the "speedy" justice system for deterring trouble-makers from joining planned far-right protests last night - and will hold a third emergency meeting later.

Thursday 8 August 2024 14:53, UK

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• Starmer calls third emergency meeting in fight against rioters
• Suspects in Downing Street riot arrested in dawn raids
• Rioters jailed for more than two years after televised sentencing
• Couple went to bingo then joined riot
• Policing minister warns more 'events' planned
• Live reporting by Mark Wyatt
• Analysis: The many reasons the far right stayed off streets last night
• Has Starmer passed his first big test?
• Watch : Bodycam footage of Southport riot | Pubgoers embrace Muslims 'defending their community'
• Explained: What does 'two-tier' policing mean - and does it exist?
• Listen: 'Unease and fear' - How Muslim communities feel about the riots
• In pictures: Signs of 'love', 'unity', and 'good vibes'

A man who shouted "who the f*** is Allah" during a riot in Plymouth and later claimed a stone found in his pocket was for "healing purposes" has been jailed. 

Michael Williams, 51, from Devon, drank six cans of Stella Artois before joining the riots on Monday.

Sentencing him at Plymouth Crown Court, Judge Robert Linford said Williams was "seen to be fighting and kicking another male" and when he was arrested he had a stone in his jogging bottoms.

 The judge dismissed as "ludicrous" Williams's claim that it was a "healing stone".

In video footage played to the court, Williams chanted "Who the f*** is Allah" and, after his arrest, repeatedly swore at police.

He was jailed for two years and eight months after pleading guilty to a charge of violent disorder yesterday.

An anti-racism campaigner says it's "fantastic" that counter-protests succeeded across the UK last night, but the political climate emboldens the far-right to act out.

"It's absolutely fantastic that people came out in solidarity with refugees and Muslims and other people that are under attack," said Nahella Ashraf, co-chair of Greater Manchester Stand Up To Racism.

"The [far-right] are cowards who will come out and attack people who are vulnerable. But when we are on the streets in big numbers, they won't dare show."

But while last night's demonstrations - along with heavy police presence - were successful in stopping further violence break out, there are concerns that more riots could still come.

That, Ms Ashraf says, wouldn't be surprising given the rhetoric employed by prominent right wing figures.

"Some of the stuff that [Nigel] Farage comes out with, the stuff that Tommy Robinson has been tweeting, but also some mainstream politicians - the way they talk about refugees and migrants and small boats. We're not surprised that it gives confidence to the far right thugs to take to the streets."

Ms Ashraf also criticised the "unacceptable" comments made by Conservative MP Robert Jenrick yesterday, in which he said those who shouted "Allahu Akbar" should be "immediately arrested".

"It's not offensive to say Allahu Akbar. It's a personal, expression of faith. Let's get this into context," she said.

"Muslim people that are using that language are no threat to the public. And yet the Tory leadership want to focus on that."

By Mhari Aurora , political correspondent

Number 10 will have breathed a huge sigh of relief this morning as the nation woke up not to images of burned-down buildings and looted shops, but community solidarity and peaceful protest.

It appears that Sir Keir Starmer's plan has worked.

Swift arrests, speedy prosecutions and the threat of being charged with terrorism offences - such punishment clearly had a deterrent effect on the rioters, alongside the large groups of counter-protesters across the country with whom far-right protesters and rioters would have been confronted.

The prime minister's experience as director of public prosecutions during the 2011 London riots has also undoubtedly been an invaluable asset to the government's handling of the violent disorder.

But the government is clear that the country is not out of the woods yet.

Dame Diana Johnson, the policing minister, this morning told Sky News: "There is now further intelligence of events during the next few days, and we need to see what happens there."

Clearly Sir Keir won't want to brand this a victory over "far-right thuggery" prematurely, but if the streets remain peaceful and justice is seen to be done with more and more faces and names of criminal rioters plastered across our screens and newspapers, the prime minister may have just proved his worth to the British public.

This violence and disorder has been his first major test since becoming prime minister a month ago, and from what we saw - or didn't see - last night, he appears to have passed with flying colours.

Most of the focus so far today has been on the legal repercussions of the riots as the courts hand down lengthy prison sentences.

But threatened communities around the country are still fearful that more riots could erupt, despite the relative calm last night.

A Birmingham-based charity has cancelled an upcoming Muslim community event "due to the current climate of fear and violence".

ISRA-UK was planning to host an overnight fundraiser called SleepOut for Gaza next Friday, but has postponed it until October.

The organisers said: "While we reject any attempt to divide our communities or our society in this way, we must remain vigilant against any threats to members of Muslim and migrant communities, or towards their friends and neighbours."

The charity is also considering postponing its Family Fun Day next Saturday.

A couple who joined in riots in Hartlepool after an afternoon bingo session have been jailed.

Steven Mailen, 54, and his partner Ryan Sheers, 29, both pleaded guilty to violent disorder after 200 people gathered in the city on 31 July.

Jailing them for two years and two months each at Teesside Crown Court, the judge said the pair were "at the very forefront of the mob" and tried to push through a police cordon.

Mailen, a former postmaster and school governor, was described as "one of the main instigators" of the large-scale disturbance.

Sheers, formerly a McDonald's worker, was bitten on the hip by a police dog during the incident.

More now on the prime minister, who has been speaking at a mosque in Solihull.

Sir Keir Starmer said one of the reasons there was less disorder than expected last night was because the UK has been able to demonstrate the "criminal justice system working speedily".

He said the three-year sentences handed down to two rioters at Liverpool Crown Court yesterday sent a "powerful message" to potential agitators.

The PM also said the number of police deployed "in the right places" gave reassurance to communities.

Watch what Sir Keir said on last night's scenes and the sentences handed to rioters here...

The prime minister has been speaking this morning as the sentencing of two rioters took place.

On a visit to a mosque in Solihull, Sir Keir Starmer announced he will hold another emergency COBRA meeting this afternoon with senior police leaders.

The prime minister said it was "important we don't let up" after mass protests failed to materialise on Wednesday.

He told broadcasters today's meeting will "make sure we reflect on last night but also plan for the coming days".

The prime minister said Wednesday went "much better than was expected" - adding "we are not going to give up on our efforts here".

He reiterated the "most important lesson" for those involved in disorder is they are seen to be arrested and charged.

Sir Keir credited the deployment of extra police and quick sentencing of people involved in disorder for the lack of unrest on Wednesday.

Judge Andrew Menary KC hands down sentencing on two rioters at Liverpool Crown Court. 

John O'Malley, 43, is jailed for 32 months for violent disorder in Southport.

"You were at the front of what was essentially a baying mob," the judge said moments ago during his sentencing remarks.

"You were at the front and participating enthusiastically," he said.

William Morgan, 69, is also sentenced to 32 months after pleading guilty to violent disorder and possession of an offensive weapon in Liverpool.

Morgan stands with his head bowed before nodding at the judge when receiving his sentence, while O'Malley mutters something inaudible as he leaves the dock.

The judge says William Nelson Morgan's "advancing years" did not stop him playing an "active part" as part of a group "running amok".

Some 100 people set fire to bins and damaged a community hub and library containing a food bank, he says.

When the rioters met police, "you were seen at the front of the mob holding in your hand... a small truncheon", the judge tells Morgan.

"I am sure you had [the weapon] with you to cause injury if the opportunity should arise."

He resisted arrest "with such force" that it took three officers to detain him.

He adds: "I think it is very sad indeed to see someone of your age and character in the dock of a Crown Court."

We are hearing comments from the judge on John O'Malley before he is sentenced.

Judge Andrew Menary KC says O'Malley was "at the front of what was essentially a baying mob".

"You were part of a crowd using obviously racist and religiously intolerant language that was demonstrating quite deliberately outside a mosque, and you were an active and persistent participant," he says.

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