Unemployed People Provide "Neighborhood Watch" To Suppress Crime

AJC: Has the recession arrested crime?

The next time you see your unemployed neighbor, a nod of gratitude is in order. He may be what’s standing between a burglar and your flat-screen TV while you’re at work.

After two long years of economic woes, this recession has managed to create a few unexpected benefits — namely a noticeable drop in crime — and confound a few economists and criminologists along the way.

Until this recent downturn, a bad economy was easy to read: crime and deviant behavior (think drug dealing, fencing and the like) go up when the economy goes down.

But the latest set of police reports across the country, including in Atlanta, don’t square with past downturns. The underground market, it seems, has been turned on its ear in this recession.

“This is a real break in past patterns,” criminologist Richard Rosenfeld told about two dozen economists from around the world who gathered in Stone Mountain this month for the second annual meeting on the “Economics of Risky Behaviors.”

More eyes on the street

Across the nation, crime, on the whole, is down considerably, especially property crimes and violent crimes such as robbery.

The counterintuitive nature of this recession makes sense when you peel back the layers.

Take home burglaries, for instance.

“We assume crime climbs when the economy is down,” said Rosenfeld, Curators Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Missouri in St. Louis. But “during high unemployment, more people are at home and that cuts the rates of burglary.”

Additionally, people tend to carry fewer valuables these days, so there are fewer street crimes such as robberies, Rosenfeld added.