The Great American Mystery Story: Why Did Crime Decline?
To stop the COVID crime wave, we must understand why crime declines: 25 explanations for the Great American Crime Decline and what it means for today
“The crime decline may be a story about ordinary people making changes to their daily lives and the resultant social stability rather than the story about cops and robbers that is prevalent in the media.”
This June, Franklin Zimring, the William G. Simon Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, will receive the Stockholm Prize in Criminology. The equivalent of the Nobel Prize for criminology, Zimring is richly deserving of this honor. He has been and remains a tremendously important and influential scholar, with the gift of writing an important book with important answers before the rest of the world has come fully to grips with the importance of the underlying problem.
Indeed, in 2018 Adam Gopnik, writing in the New Yorker, credits Zimring for the phrase, The Great American Crime Decline. On that topic, Zimring’s 2011 book, The City that Became Safe offers a stinging critique of then conventional notions of why crime occurs—because som…
