Crime and crime rates are often topics of conversation around elections, and this year is no different. FBI data show violent crime is down, but those and other numbers are often incomplete. It’s impossible to know how many crimes are committed and not reported.
Bradley Bartos, a professor in the School of Government and Public Policy at the University of Arizona, says crime as we know it is evolving. Bartos joined The Show to talk about what stands out to him about the data.
Full conversation
What stands out to to you about the data?
BRADLEY BARTOS: Well, that involves a few simultaneous big-picture changes. All of this began — our modern kind of sensibility towards the recent rise in crime — happened during the pandemic 2020 through 2022. And now we're seeing preliminary results from the FBI's uniform crime report quarterly estimates that we're seeing some large decreases. And this has been backed up by various third-party data sources that have looked at city police departments and data, public data portals and collecting those into a multi-city kind of canary for the nation. More or less giving a sense of where crime is going in a faster, potentially more reactive, manner.
Was there something about the pandemic era that fundamentally changed crime? Or maybe the kinds of crimes that were being committed or the ways in which they were being committed?
BARTOS: ... I think it helps to talk about why crime happens at all to answer that question, right? Like why does crime occur? Two theories that I think are particularly relevant to our COVID-era changes, a change to our routine activities. So routine activities theory states that crime will occur if three conditions are met: there's an attractive target, a motivated offender and the absence of a capable guardian. You get all three of those things, then crime will occur. If any one of them is missing, it will not.
So in that framework, our routines ... where we were, how we behaved, what we did throughout the day changed pretty drastically once work-from-home, school closures and even the more or less restaurant and retail spaces we previously inhabited. Instead we were more or less in our homes. Online shopping more than ever before. Those changes are as temporary as the changes to our routines. So as kids are more reliably at school, fewer closures for COVID and for other various interruptions to the supervision of kids, as those kind of go away, we might see us return to a pre-pandemic normal.
Now, the other theory, you know, why does crime occur that I want to talk about is strain theory. Basically, the mismatch between your needs and the legitimate means you have to satisfy your needs once.
When you talk about changing routines during COVID-19 and you know, some of the the stressors that people were under, could that have led, for example, to the increase in motor vehicle thefts? If people weren't leaving their homes as much and the cars were maybe sitting in a driveway or sitting on the street park somewhere. Does that help in any way?
BARTOS: You are 100% correct. And, in fact, not only are by not commuting to and from work and not using our cars, you know, and as many times throughout the day ... means that we are not guarding our vehicles. You know, those three things that have to happen for a crime to occur, you know, attractive target, motivated offender. Well, who guards your car from a car theft? Somebody being in it around it to watch it and, you know, more or less identify the person who is stealing the car.
Now take that logic to another piece of high-value property that we were guarding more closely than ever before: our homes. So residential burglary, big reductions in each year since the pandemic. So between 2019 and 2020., there's a 21% reduction in residential burglary and that stayed stable between 20% and 26% over the next four years. So as we spend less time in our cars, more time at home, our cars are more vulnerable, our homes are less so.
How has the online world has changed all of this, both in terms of different types of cybercrime, but also the ability to track different kinds of crime? And maybe even the ability to publicize different kinds of crime online sites or social media, things like that.
BARTOS: Yeah, absolutely. I mean why the reason why these large group shoplifting events are so powerful tools in making public and each of us feel like property is less safe right now than it was in the past. And a large part of that is due to how many cellphone videos, CCTV cameras that are actually recording the digital hard drives. Having these videos makes egregious crime events really powerful in our memories and really influential in how much we fear crime. Now, if fewer people are being victimized, but we're all vicariously seeing victims through these videos, we might get a really biased sense of what's actually going on on the ground.
Now, we have taken a lot of our activity — not just since 2020 but since the '80s the mid-'80s — we have slowly relegated certain activities. We used to have to go into public, we slowly and steadily relegated many of those things to digital commerce and communication. So criminologists love to look at the rise in crime and the great American crime drop that happened through the '70s to the early '90s all the way through about 2016, there was just year after year falling violent and property crime.
And again, it's this, how many simultaneous things do we have to disentangle to get a picture of it? But in a routine activities framework, we simply were exposing ourselves to fewer robberies. We are exposing our houses to fewer burglaries. The opportunities that we have are the risks that we face for victimization and the risks our property face have been reduced pretty heavily by the amount of distance we put between each other through the internet.
