Here is a brief clip on “secular forces” that drive macro rates, from my newish book on Stop & Firsk
The Crime Climate. As indicated in Chapter 2, crime goes up and down in the United States for reasons eluding our clear understanding (see Rosenfeld, 2018). Statistical analyses of long-term trends in crime across large samples of cities find there is a "non-local" component to the city-by city oscillations that in the aggregate make up national cycles. Hiding behind individual ups and downs in city crime is a common, shared trend. McDowall & Loftin (2000) calculated that this deep trend accounted for about 20 per cent of the variation in crime over time and across cities, a considerable fraction. This was not true for all the cities they studied, but they found that in an average year about two-thirds of cities and their residents were affected by the national trend.
LATER
The analysis therefore includes a measure of the violent crime trend in other regional cities during the 2004-2018 period. Because of the focus here on a rise in shootings and killings, this measure combines monthly assault, robbery, and murder rates per thousand (because the cities varied in size) for Milwaukee, St. Louis, Kansas City (Missouri), Indianapolis, Detroit, Cincinnati, and Cleveland. We can think of this as a "control" time series, one reflecting common, non-local city trends. It is a "synthetic" control because it is constructed from a group of racially diverse Midwestern rust-belt cities that, prior to the late-2015 collapse of stop & frisk, tracked the ups and downs in shootings and killings in Chicago (Abadie, et al., 2010).
Figure 7-7 illustrates the close relationship between violent crime trends in Chicago and these seven cities over much of the post-2004 period. Before 2016, Chicago tracked regional trends, which predicted the local number of shootings quite effectively for 12 years. During this period, the correlation between violent crime across these seven cities and shootings in Chicago was +.61. But, beginning in 2016, the synthetic trend in the crime climate for the previous 12 years predicted continued stability in shootings and killings in Chicago, not the spike in violence
coming on the heels of the collapse of stop & frisk As the shaded area illustrates, during 2016
there were 1,800 more shootings in Chicago than the common trend in other regional cities would
predict; during 2017 there were 880 unanticipated shootings, and an unexpectedly high
shooting count during the summer of 2018 is also visible.
There is a podcast - Between the Cracks - which took a unique, ambitious approach, similar to yours here, about a heartbreaking crime. A little girl disappeared from a homeless shelter and it appears that one of the workers may have taken her. Every other podcast / tv show / book would have focused on the man who took her, but this one focused on all the societal structures that put the little girl in that shelter to begin with. It blew my mind.
Absolutely, this is a good way forward. We look at history of crime and crime prevention in 19th and 20th century and one thing that is clear is that is complex. It does seem that the discipline needs to consider micro and macro trends and think about local, national, and world trends.
Here is a brief clip on “secular forces” that drive macro rates, from my newish book on Stop & Firsk
The Crime Climate. As indicated in Chapter 2, crime goes up and down in the United States for reasons eluding our clear understanding (see Rosenfeld, 2018). Statistical analyses of long-term trends in crime across large samples of cities find there is a "non-local" component to the city-by city oscillations that in the aggregate make up national cycles. Hiding behind individual ups and downs in city crime is a common, shared trend. McDowall & Loftin (2000) calculated that this deep trend accounted for about 20 per cent of the variation in crime over time and across cities, a considerable fraction. This was not true for all the cities they studied, but they found that in an average year about two-thirds of cities and their residents were affected by the national trend.
LATER
The analysis therefore includes a measure of the violent crime trend in other regional cities during the 2004-2018 period. Because of the focus here on a rise in shootings and killings, this measure combines monthly assault, robbery, and murder rates per thousand (because the cities varied in size) for Milwaukee, St. Louis, Kansas City (Missouri), Indianapolis, Detroit, Cincinnati, and Cleveland. We can think of this as a "control" time series, one reflecting common, non-local city trends. It is a "synthetic" control because it is constructed from a group of racially diverse Midwestern rust-belt cities that, prior to the late-2015 collapse of stop & frisk, tracked the ups and downs in shootings and killings in Chicago (Abadie, et al., 2010).
Figure 7-7 illustrates the close relationship between violent crime trends in Chicago and these seven cities over much of the post-2004 period. Before 2016, Chicago tracked regional trends, which predicted the local number of shootings quite effectively for 12 years. During this period, the correlation between violent crime across these seven cities and shootings in Chicago was +.61. But, beginning in 2016, the synthetic trend in the crime climate for the previous 12 years predicted continued stability in shootings and killings in Chicago, not the spike in violence
coming on the heels of the collapse of stop & frisk As the shaded area illustrates, during 2016
there were 1,800 more shootings in Chicago than the common trend in other regional cities would
predict; during 2017 there were 880 unanticipated shootings, and an unexpectedly high
shooting count during the summer of 2018 is also visible.
ETC
There is a podcast - Between the Cracks - which took a unique, ambitious approach, similar to yours here, about a heartbreaking crime. A little girl disappeared from a homeless shelter and it appears that one of the workers may have taken her. Every other podcast / tv show / book would have focused on the man who took her, but this one focused on all the societal structures that put the little girl in that shelter to begin with. It blew my mind.
Absolutely, this is a good way forward. We look at history of crime and crime prevention in 19th and 20th century and one thing that is clear is that is complex. It does seem that the discipline needs to consider micro and macro trends and think about local, national, and world trends.