“Kaid Benfield" - Cities safer than ever, and the more diverse the better
July 10, 2011 http://www.grist.org/cities/2011-07-08-cities-safer-than-ever-especially-diverse-ones
8 Jul 2011
Cross-posted from the National Resources Defense Council.
I wrote in May about a report by Richard Florida that city crime had dropped to its lowest rate in 40 years. Now there's more: Last week, Florida wrote another intriguing analysis of recent crime data for The Atlantic. Looking inside the numbers and at recent research, he shatters a number of popular myths: that crime is higher when economic times are hardest; that big cities and minority populations are incubators of crime; that immigration breeds crime.
None of these myths are supported by recent facts, according to Florida. Here's some of his latest report:
Almost three years into the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, with massive unemployment and pessimism rife, America's crime rates are falling and no one -- not our pundits, policemen, or politicians, our professors or city planners -- can tell us why. As I wrote about here, there were 5.5 percent fewer murders, forcible rapes, robberies and aggravated assaults reported in 2010 than in 2009, according to the most recent edition of the FBI's Uniform Crime Report; property crimes fell by 2.8 percent over the same period and reported arsons dropped by 8.3 percent.
And the drop was steepest in America's biggest cities -- which are still popularly believed to be cauldrons of criminality. "While cities and suburbs alike are much safer today than in 1990," notes a recent report by the Brookings Institution, "central cities -- the big cities that make up the hubs of the 100 largest metro areas -- benefited the most from declining crime rates. Among suburban communities, older, higher-density suburbs saw crime drop at a faster pace than newer, lower-density, emerging, and exurban communities on the metropolitan fringe."