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The Homicide Spike: Follow the (Local) Leaders

By Jonathan Simor

In the 1990s American cities enjoyed a spectacular decline in violent crimes including homicides (see Frank Zimring's book for the best accounting of what happened and why). Some cities thankfully are still enjoying that decline, or at least a plateau at significantly lower levels of violence than they experienced in the 1980s and early 1990s. In others however, including Philadelphia, Newark, and the cities of my own Bay Area (SF, Oakland, Richmond) 2007 continued an alarming upturn in violent crimes, including highly visible homicides.The only good news in this trend so far is that most of the action remains at the local level. Our national leaders, preoccupied with Iraq, have so far not been able to shift policy debate toward the war on crime as they did after other spectacular governmental failures like the collapse of the Clinton health plan in 1994...continue to full post

Full post as published by Governing Through Crime on January 17, 2008 (boomark / email).