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Emergency Service Unit officers guard a police escort van.

By most anyone’s estimation, a recession would be the perfect recipe for a crime spike. But in the last several years, and in fact consistently over the last 20 years, crime rates have been falling in cities nationwide. A new report from the Brookings Institution provides a snapshot of 100 metropolitan areas, which have become increasingly safer; when communities become more diverse, economically and demographically, crime rates tend to fall. In California, where the economy has been depressed for going on five years, the rate of violent crime has fallen to a 44-year-low. What happened to the old conventional wisdom that in bad economic times, crime increases? That’s not the only thinking that was turned upside down in the crime statistics: the gap between suburban and city crime rates declined dramatically; the social characteristics associated with crime, like immigration or ethnic diversity, had limited connection to crime rates since 1990. Has the U.S. simply become a safer place in which to live?

Guests:

Steven Raphael, professor of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley and one of the report authors

Michael Stoll, professor of public policy at UCLA, where he studies urban problems such poverty, labor markets and crime.