Violent crime rises for first time in 5 years, FBI reports

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

Murders, robberies and aggravated assaults in the United States increased last year, spurring an overall rise in violent crime for the first time since 2001, according to FBI data.

Murders rose 4.8 percent, meaning there were more than 16,900 victims in 2005. That would be the most since 1998 and the largest percentage increase in 15 years.

And

Criminal justice experts said the statistics reflect the nation's complacency in fighting crime, a product of dramatic declines in the 1990s and the abandonment of effective programs that emphasized prevention, putting more police officers on the street and controlling the spread of guns.

"We see that budgets for policing are being slashed and the federal government has gotten out of that business," said James Alan Fox, a criminal justice professor at Northeastern University in Boston. "Funding for prevention at the federal level and many localities are down and the (National Rifle Association) has renewed strength."

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Of course, explanations for changes in the crime rate are always many and diverse. The Freakonomics guys, for instance, suggest that the famed crime rate drop of the 90s resulted from fewer poverty stricken children in the 70s and 80s, thanks to the legalization of abortion, rather than from conventional wisdom's favorite explanation, the booming economy. Consequently, I think the experts quoted in this article are only scratching the surface here. Bush's incompetence and lack of seriousness about governing certainly play a part in this crime wave, but I think he can't really take much of the blame for this one. Instead, we have to look back on his predecessors. Starting with Reagan, then continuing with Bush and Clinton, who Michael Moore once called the best Republican President we've ever had, neoliberal economic policies have shredded our once dependable social safety net, destroyed the rights of workers to organize and collectively bargain for for better wages, benefits, hours, and working conditions, all the while paving the way for the outsourcing of good middle class jobs to other countries. This doesn't even get into health care issues or the conversion of our culture into spiritually vacant consumerism and materialism, or the triumph of greed as a philosophical value. What's going on is that twenty five years of brutal right-wing social engineering is starting to have a payoff. That is, people, lacking basic necessities, lacking hope, are getting desperate. The correlation between poverty and crime has long been known, but I think this is something new, something worse. Neoliberalism is turning us bad.

I expect violent crime only to increase in the years to come.

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