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Monday 7 December 2009
Why Homicide Declined in American Cities during the First Six Months of 2009

But not all criminologists were surprised by the sudden decline in urban homicide. In fact, in 2008 a number of people predicted that the homicide rate might decline, depending on who won the presidential election. Psychologists, sociologists, and historians now have a growing body of evidence that suggests that the rate of violence among unrelated adults is determined by the feelings people have toward their society and their government and the degree to which they trust their elected officials. Gary LaFree, the past president of the American Society of Criminology, pointed out that in recent years the strongest correlates of violence have been the proportion of Americans who trust the government to do the right thing most of the time and the proportion who believe most government officials are honest. When public opinion polls show that those proportions are high, as they were in the 1950s during the Eisenhower administration, the rate of violence has been low.  When those proportions are low, as they have been more or less since the mid-1960s, the rate of violence has been high.

The relationship between violence and feelings about government tracks separately by race.  The black homicide rate peaked between 1971 and 1974, when black trust in government reached its post-World War II low.  The white homicide rate peaked in 1980 during the final year of the Carter administration, when white trust in government reached its postwar low because of accumulated anger over busing, welfare, affirmative action, the defeat in Vietnam, and the seizure of American hostages in Iran.  That rate—7 per 100,000 white persons per year—was by itself three to fifteen times the homicide rate in other affluent nations.

Why does faith in government have a profound impact on interpersonal violence? How people feel about the government plays an important role in determining how they feel about themselves and society. If people believe that their government shares their values, speaks for them and acts on their behalf, they feel greater self-respect and gain confidence in their dealings with people outside their families. What matters is that citizens feel represented, included, and empowered. When people doubt the honesty and competence of public officials and question the legitimacy of their government, especially on the national level, they can feel frustrated, alienated, and dishonored. And those feelings, in turn, can stimulate the hostile, defensive, and predatory feelings that lead to violence against friends, acquaintances, and strangers. Trust in government is not the only prerequisite for lower rates of violence, but it is a powerful one, and we have now traced a persistent correlation between such trust and low homicide rates through the histories of dozens of nations reaching back at least as far as the seventeenth century.

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