When I was a kid at school, having a haircut or getting a new pair of shoes, marked you out for ridicule, ironically in the same way that having long hair (not getting it cut), and having old shoes (not getting new ones), also marked you out for ridicule i.e., you were damned if you did, damned if you didn’t etc. I belong to Gen X (those born between 1965 and 1980), and to be honest I think people of my generation are pretty crap, and I have some statistics to back up this statement. Crime rates started to fall – and have continued to fall, albeit with blips – in the mid 1990’s (when the proportion of young people was increasing), just when my generation was starting to age out of crime.

      It is largely accepted in criminology that maleness and youthfulness, are basically the two biggest predictors of crime, including violent crime; young men are also (with the exception of sex crimes, elder abuse and corporate crime, the most likely demographic to be victimized i.e., young men are most likely to be victimized by other young men e.g., whilst men are eight times more likely to be the perpetrators of homicide than women, they are also three times more likely to be the victims of homicide than women etc. Whilst criminologists will talk about the effect of testosterone on aggression (gender) and the lack of “social control” (age/youth) and risk-taking which is associated with youthfulness, neither of these two things explain or can account for crime waves e.g., certain crimes suddenly going up, and then suddenly going down. If gender and age were the only factors regarding offending in a demographically stable society, crime would always be at the same level/rate. In this article I want to take a look at some of the things, or the absence of things, which cause certain crimes to go up, and at the same time what causes them to drop and fall. Using Vincent F. Sacco’s “model” I will take a brief look at how: Dislocation, Diffusion and Innovation affect crime waves.

Economic Dislocation

In both criminology and popular thinking, crime has been linked to poverty. However, the relationship between crime and poverty is not a clear or strong one e.g., many types of crime went down during the Great Depression; while during the 1960’s and 1970’s whilst the standard of living rose significantly in most Western countries, so did crime – especially violent crimes. One of the factors associated with poverty is unemployment, however there is no strong link between unemployment and crime. In fact, unemployment can cause a reduction in certain types of crime such as assault and burglary. When people are unemployed and have less disposable income, they are more likely to stay at home, increasing guardianship and reducing the risk of their home being broken into, and they are less likely to be able to afford socializing in pubs, bars, clubs and other similar settings where violence occurs. Studies into the crime decline that started in the 1990’s have noticed a correlation between this and the rate of unemployment, however it appears that crime started to drop before unemployment suggesting that there is no causal relationship/link. There are those that believe the rapid increase in crime that the US and other countries experienced in the postwar period was the result of the restructuring of certain industries and economies, that moved many people from primary to secondary labor markets, whilst maintaining a stable/high employment rate yet depriving people of a living wage e.g., as technology took over relatively high-skilled jobs, lower-skilled workers who had fulfilled these roles were displaced into much lower paid jobs, such as working in the food service industry, etc. This meant that previously well-paying, stable jobs were removed from the labor market, forcing people into lower-paid and unstable work.

Diffusion

    The sociologist Claude Fischer has made the argument that crime, like fashion, initially starts in urban settings, and then diffuses out into suburban and less urban ones. Crime and violence behave in a similar way to other things that “catch on”. He found that in California that between 1955 and 1975, certain crimes started in urban areas, and then moved out of the big cities and towns, to smaller suburban and rural areas e.g., if street robberies started to peak in LA, then weeks and months later, smaller locales would see an increase in these types of offenses etc. Crime waves were literally like waves, that spread and diffused after first hitting/crashing their particular target. The media can play a significant role in crime diffusion/contagion, informing and educating individuals in other locations about a crime wave that might be occurring in a very geographically restricted locale i.e. prompting/creating “copycat” crime. This has been observed in the media reporting of school and workplace shootings, where students/employees with similar grievances engage in copycat offenses after being informed of how someone else has responded. This might see a rapid increase with certain offenses, followed by a similarly rapid decrease.

Innovation

    Felson and Cohen believed that the cause of the increase in the crime-rate during the post-war period, especially in the 1960’s and 1970s’ was due to “innovation” i.e., that people – due to increased disposable income – were leading “new” and very different lives to those they’d been living/experiencing before. With an increase in “wealth” they could now spend more time away from the home engaged in social and leisure activities (the opposite of someone who is unemployed). After the war people became more mobile and started to spend their time in public spaces. This period also saw the birth of the “teenager” i.e., young people with disposable income, who spent their money socializing. At the same time technology was getting smaller e.g., the transistor radio reduced something that had once been restricted to being a fixture in a living room into something that was portable – making it far easier to steal and conceal etc.

    Crime waves occur as a result of dislocation, diffusion and innovation, rather than simply as a result of more people being motivated to offend. However, it would be wrong to ignore social and cultural factors. Millennials and Gen Z as populations don’t emphasize “toughness” and “risk-taking” to the same degree that Gen X did, and physical aggression is less emphasized than emotional intelligence. Whilst there may be many – especially on social media – who try to portray this as a bad thing e.g., “In my day we’d be kicked out of the house at first light, and made to wander the streets, making our own entertainment…” I generally believe that society moving in a more tolerant and forgiving nature is a good thing. This doesn’t mean there won’t be future crime waves and fluctuations in the crime rate, as there will always be dislocation, diffusion and innovation, but it will take major societal changes to bring us back to the high crime rates of the 1970’s and 1980’s.