Question

Murder rates are going up in some major cities , while New York City and Oakland are dropping. To what attribute the rise in violent crime and reason why others are falling?

Answer 1

New York City has gone from “being one of the most dangerous cities in America to becoming one of the most crime-free metropolises in the developed world.” Similarly, Oakland as rightly stated sees a decline in Violent crimes.

Psychological studies have identified numerous factors that determine our behaviour and whether a person is at risk for developing violent tendencies. These factors include biological traits, family bonding, individual characteristics, intelligence and education, child development, peer relationships, cultural shaping and resiliency. Each factor of a person's life can affect and be affected by another factor. When the accumulation of negative factors (such as maltreatment, chaotic neighbourhoods, or psychological problems) and the absence of positive factors (such as opportunities to be successful, adults who provide encouragement, or a resilient temperament) reach a threshold, that's when violence is more likely to erupt as a means of coping with life's problems.

Frequent incidents of crime, ranging from violent crimes to petty theft pervade several American cities.While statistics from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the US Census Bureau report that city crimes in the US have been on the decline since 1991, some of the big cities are still disproportionately victimized by a variety of crime events daily.

Let’s start to get at the core question of how cities develop or don’t, how communities are integrated and isolated, how violence is transferred between people, and how, ultimately, environments shape behaviour.

Neighbourhoods shape behaviour:

The economic flight, systemic housing discrimination, zoning laws that isolate the poor, and a long list of other factors lead to concentrated poverty. That concentrated poverty leads to what sociologist’s call “neighbourhood-level effect,” where, basically, the neighbourhood environment you live in is highly predictive of behaviour — for example, when single moms in a US City were placed in low-poverty neighbourhoods, their academic performance surpassed the control group in high-poverty neighbourhoods.

When poverty is concentrated, it creates a culture on the street where violence becomes endemic. If you’re a teen or a youth in those environments, you have to show the capability of violence so that you’re not “constantly victimized”, not because you want to be a predator, but as a form of self-defence. “In New York, the neighbourhood-level effect is isolated to a few places,” with pockets of concentrated poverty like public housing serving as a huge source of gun violence. But in some other major cities, a third of the city is caught up in this dynamic. That’s why, targeting individuals doesn’t work in the long term, since it doesn’t change the culture of a place. If one-unit ages out of violence, gets incarcerated, or gets killed, then the next group of 13- or 14-year-olds is ready to come up and take their place. Structural poverty leads to social structures.

Many people, social activists including psychologists suggest that these behavioural tragedies happen due to the lack of attention to the children from their parents and teachers. In my opinion, though the above-said context is true and significant, there are obviously many other reasons contributing to it. An increase or decrease in the crimes can also be attributed to people valued for money rather than the values and relations.

City dwellers are often perceived as being at more risk of violence than those in rural areas. Cities often present significant risk factors that encourage violence. These include mass unemployment, gang violence, weakened security institutions, organized crime, firearms proliferation, limited government capacity, and rising inequality. Seventy-five per cent of the world’s cities have higher levels of income inequalities than two decades ago. Many factors affect patterns of violence in cities, including changes in socio-economic and demographic factors, migration flows, prevention programmes, security reforms, security responses, and access to local resources.

Hope this explains the predicament of the fluctuating crime graph and is free of any ambiguity.

Thanks