Violent Crime Rising in Germany, Falling in States

Thanks to Kevin Drum, I've been twigged to Zanran, a new web search engine that brings you statistics and graphs. Here are a couple of graphs I got by searching for the German crime rate (which are from this paper):The American figures, from this report, result in the following graph:

The drop in violent crime has continued since 2005, despite economic hard times. This has sparked a lot of interest. According to Kevin Drum's summary of a spate of recent articles on the phenomenon, the short explanation for the crime drop in the States is "perhaps one-quarter due to increased incarceration, one-quarter due to reduced cocaine use, and one half due to reductions in blood lead levels in children."

Note that Germany started from a much lower baseline; therefore (assuming the statistics are roughly comparable), the U.S. still has more violent crime than Germany. But if the U.S. is at 450 incidents per 100,000 and dropping, and Germany is at 280 and rising, the gap will close if current trends continue. Indeed, it might even have already closed.

I can imagine the soul-searching that would be prompted by the news that Germany has more violent crime than the U.S. Keep in mind, though, that even if Germany develops similar levels of violent crime in general, American will still have much more lethal crime than Germany, mostly because of guns.

Comments

[Michael]

Just found this one:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/24/us/24crime.html

@ann: I am not sure, if I should believe the "abortion connection". But if one does, then the crime rate can still fall despite lower abortion rates: The children of those "aborted criminals" (I can't believe I am writing something that awful) are now missing too - and chances are that this would have been troubled children.

[Johannes]

I have no good idea where the rise in Germany from the early '60ties to the '80ties comes from. Could it be that back then types of cases like a lot of domestic violence or pub brawls had often not been brought to the attention of the authorities?

Probably some of the rise since the early nineties can be blamed on the insecurities in the wake of the unification, high unemployment rates, rise of neonazi or more general hooligan-style violence (sometimes also left wing, like traditionally on the first of May in Kreuzberg and elsewhere). Gang violence in some of the larger cities probably also increased, Russian, Albanian, Serbian drug and human trafficking mafias etc. Nothing of the latter in the idyllic '80ties

[Alexander]

@Ney: I just thought I advise caution when trying to interpret these figures because you don't know how they arrived at those numbers.

[ann]

I've heard that argument, too. The abortion rate has declined since the early 80's (from 23.9 to 19.6 per 1000 women of childbearing age). One would think that that would mean the crime rate was going up in the US.
I live in a very safe city in SW Germany. It would be interesting to see how those crime statistics are distributed across the country.

[Ney]

Dear Alexander, what do you want to tell us by this trite phrase?

Anyway, since 2005 there has been a slight decrease in the number of violent crimes, I guess the same is true vor the per 100'000 population.
http://www.bka.de/pks/pks2010/download/pks2010_imk_kurzbericht.pdf
Page 18.

[Alexander]

Never trust a statistic that you did not forge yourself!

[Michael]

There are also other - even more controversial - theories, on why crime rate falls since the 90s:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Impact_of_Legalized_Abortion_on_Crime