During the recent years of "declining crime rates," a lot of theories were expressed, most of them junk. Now that the rate seems to be going the other way, the experts are trotted out again, with equally lame theories. The one that rings truest for me is this one:
"Violence rates were low for five or six years, at least relative to what they had been," he said. "Maybe we got lazy and accepted that that's what things are. We forgot that we had to work to get them that low."
People with severe mental illness sometimes do what people with physical ailments do -- they start feeling better, so they stop taking their medications, and the illnesses comes back. I suspect it works that way for the health of our cities. Things start looking better, so we start diverting the resources that made them better to other uses.
