just out of curiosity I recently was looking over crime rates in the U.S. and there seems to be a huge burst of crime beginning in the late 1950's and climbing until the early 1990's. What caused such a dramatic up swing?
Posted Feb 7, 2015, 8:12 PM UTC
hi all! just a reminder of this sub's "20 year rule", so when responding to this question, do limit your answers to events/conditions up to 1995 only. thanks!
You would likely be better off posing this question to r/AskSocialScience. There's not a lot of consensus on why violent crime peaked in the 90's and fell since then, so you still may not find a satisfactory answer.
thank you I will try that.
I have a degree in Criminal Justice, and criminology is a very vast field with many reasons within that could explain this answer. What type of crime rose specifically? Did some crime rise and some crime fall? Typically, around the holiday seasons, robbery will increase because citizens are looking to provide gifts for their loved ones. Also, if the economy is bad robbery will also rise.
For example, in this UCR from the FBI http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/1995/95sec2.pdf
it lists that "robbery was the lowest since 1989." A distinction should be made that robbery is defined legally as "the taking of goods from another" http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/robbery and is not the same as burglary, which is defined as "breaking and entering a building" http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/burglary
The UCR listed above shows that in December in every month of every year robbery goes up.
1991 - up to 9.2 from 8.7 in November
1992 - up to 9.0 from 8.3 in November
1993 - up to 9.4 from 8.5 in November
1994 - up to 8.4 from 8.2 in November
1995 - up to 8.9 from 8.7 in November
(this is all from page 23 in the UCR).
Which should be enough empirical evidence to support my "robbery rises" claim.
For other claims I would have to know which type of crime in particular you are talking about.
edit: formatting
Thank you for your reply. I am more looking for records prior to 1960. Do they exist? Did something change circa 1958 or is this the mark of better record keeping?
I'm almost certain records exist prior to 1960, but if I were to take an educated guess I would say that they are probably on paper and carbon copy, and may or may not be online.
Since 1958 it's probably the mark of better record keeping. Since programming became available the process is now:
LEO writes up a ticket
Program automatically copies that as documentation of arrest & makes a copy for the court
&
automatically sends the file right off to the court house for documentation.
This is a FOIA form. It's called the Freedom Of Information Act, and says that legally you can ask for and look up certain information. You can actually write to various law enforcement around the country and ask for certain cases. It doesn't mean you'll get them or you'll even get a reply, but you can try to look for things. http://www.fbi.gov/foia/requesting-fbi-records
The FBI has a vault here http://vault.fbi.gov/reading-room-index
with the most common documents in PDF. It's categorized by ABC order.
I may have found my answer here. It seems the information was not available prior to 1958. http://www.ucrdatatool.gov/