It's good news that the Fort Wayne crime rate is, as Mayor Henry says "the lowest in three decades." And we shouldn't begrudge Police Chief Rusty York a little bragging about "trending" and other preventive techniques they've been using. But it's myopic -- and a little disingenuous -- to pretend we've found some magic trick here when, in fact, we're just part of a nationwide trend that has seen a dramatic drop in crime that is baffling the experts:
Looking for some good news in a year full of economic woe? Crime was down in 2009. Way down.
According to figures released this week by the FBI, the overall crime rate dropped by 4.4 percent this year. Property crime dropped by 6.1 percent and homicides were down an eye-popping 10 percent. In fact, crime rates have fallen to levels not seen since the 1960s.
And this is during a severe recession when, all the "root cause" folks tell us, crime is supposed to go way up. The fact is, we really don't know very much about why crime rates go up or down -- as this New York Times story notes, "No single lens — sociological, econometrical, liberal or conservative — seems an adequate one through which to view crime." Maybe some of the decrease is due to advances in technology and better policing. But some of it might just be the simple fact that the population is aging and crime is generally a folly of the young.
