Three Key Indicators: Murder, Robbery and Burglary (by Alfred Blumstein, with Hee Jun)

Public safety is addressed by the indicator project in terms of crime victimization as reported to their local police by victims. The data in the public safety report just published on the PittsburghToday website are compiled for the nation as a whole by the FBI which publishes the Uniform Crime Reports or UCR, an annual document with reports for individual municipalities and aggregated into MSAs and for the nation as a whole. An additional document, Crime Victimization, is published annually by the Bureau of Justice Statistics of the US Department of Justice.

The victimization report is based on a semiannual survey (National Crime Victimization Survey or NCVS) of about 60,000 households and is intended to learn about individual victimization experiences, and particularly those experiences that did not get reported to the police. In order to protect the privacy of the individual respondents, the results of the victimization survey are reported only for the nation as a whole with no local disaggregation. Thus, one turns to the UCR to develop crime rates for individual cities or MSAs.

The UCR reports on crime rates for seven specific types of crime designated as Part I crimes. These include the violent crimes of murder, forcible rape, robbery, aggravated assault, and the property crimes of burglary, motor vehicle theft, and larceny. In our report we focus on three of these crime types: murder (obviously the most serious and the best reported), robbery (taking of property from an individual by force or threat of force), and burglary (breaking and entering into private property).

We chose these because they are seen as serious and are well-defined offenses (in contrast, for example, to aggravated assault which requires subjective judgment to distinguish “aggravated” from “simple”) and they are reasonably well reported (in contrast, for example, to forcible rape, which is poorly reported and whose reporting rate could fluctuate from year to year or from jurisdiction to jurisdiction).

Motor vehicle theft is well defined and well reported (largely because insurance coverage requires the reporting and recovery of the stolen vehicle is most likely to be achieved by the police), but is seen as less serious than burglary. Larceny is a wide ranging form of theft that includes shoplifting, bicycle theft, theft of hubcaps, and many other forms of theft that do not involve force or invasion of private property.

One important feature of the geographic distribution of crime is the recognition that most crime occurs in “hot spots,” typically neighborhoods of significant social disadvantage, including single-parent households, low income, high unemployment, high mobility of residents, high vacancy rates of residences, and other factors of disadvantage. These neighborhoods are most often in the central city and represent small geographic area of the individual cities and so an even smaller part of MSAs.

It is often of interest to know something about the demographic characteristics of both victims and offenders. This is of interest because there are strong demographic correlates of offending, with offending being most prevalent by males, young people, and racial minorities. Demographic information is available from the FBI’s Supplementary Homicide Reports or SHR, which involve a compilation by police departments of detailed records of individual homicides containing information on the victim characteristics, the perpetrator characteristics if known, victim-offender relationship, circumstances surrounding the homicide (e.g., argument, drug involvement, gang involvement, etc.). For the other Part I crimes, demographic information is available only on the basis of arrest. Such arrest information is available also for the 20 or so Part II crimes, which cover a broad range of offenses including other property or violent offenses, drugs offenses, and a wide variety of public-order offenses like prostitution and other vice crimes, vandalism, and disorderly conduct.

The Part I crimes were chosen partly because of their seriousness and partly because they were likely to be reported to the police; according to the recent Crime Victimization report, victims report robbery 57% of the time and burglary 50% of the time. The Part II crimes are generally seen as less serious, many involve no particular victim who would report it (e.g., drug crimes and public-order crimes), and often are established as a crime only when an arrest occurs.

National crime rates tend to move together but often show striking divergences. Most crime rates reached a peak in 1980 as the peak of the baby boomers (the 1960 birth cohort) moved out of the high- crime ages of the late teens and early 20s. The subsequent decline was interrupted by the violence associated with the crack markets, and especially by the recruitment beginning in 1985 of young people into those markets. Between 1985 and 1993, there was about a 25% increase in murder and robbery, and this increase was widespread across the nation. Following a peak in about 1993 associated with the decline in demand for crack, there was a decline of over 40% in murder and robbery until 2000. In contrast, burglary declined fairly steadily throughout that period. Since 2000, national crime rates have been impressively flat albeit with considerable variation across individual cities, with some going up, others coming down, and still others up and down or down and up. Thus, the common national trend of the 1990s has been replaced much more by local conditions. This makes the benchmark study particularly important as a means of exploring those individual city differences.

Alfred Blumstein is J. Erik Jonsson University Professor of urban systems and operations research, H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management, Carnegie Mellon University. Among many honors, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1998 and awarded the 2007 Stockholm Prize in Criminology. Dr. Blumstein was chairman of the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency, 1979-1990 and a member of the Pennsylvania Commission on Sentencing, 1986-1996.

Hee Jun has worked with Dr. Blumstein examining disproportionate minority representation in the criminal justice system, while earning a MS degree in Public Policy and Management. She will join the US Office of Management and Budget in the fall.

Alfred Blumstein
The Heinz School
Carnegie Mellon University
ab0q@andrew.cmu.edu