8 - An Economic Model of Recent Trends in Violence

Summary

between the mid-1980s and the early 1990s, violent crime in the United States rose by 41 percent, from 538 to 758 such crimes per 100,000 residents. As great as this increase was, it masked even sharper increases in particular crimes in particular areas. In Washington, D.C., for example, the number of murders climbed from 147 in 1985 to 482 in 1991, an increase of 328 percent during a period when the D.C. population was declining. In the early 1990s, much of the United States was in the midst of a violent crime epidemic.

By 1997, the violent crime rate had dropped to 611 per 100,000 residents, down 15 percent from its peak in 1991. The murder rate was 6.8 per 100,000 residents, down from 9.8 at its 1991 high. Just a few years after its peak, violent crime generally stood at its lowest level in a decade. The murder rate was lower than at any time since 1967.

What explains the rise and fall of violence over this period? A number of hypotheses have been offered to explain the increase in violent crime during the late 1980s and early 1990s. These explanations range from the “super-predator” hypothesis (Bennett, DiIulio, and Walters 1996) to the proliferation of guns to the emergence of crack cocaine (Blumstein 1995; Blumstein and Cork 1996; Cook and Laub 1998; Grogger and Willis forthcoming).