Editor’s Note: This is one of Linda’s Wordle Word entries. It was written some time ago. I’m just posting it now.
All the Crime By Linda Stowe
This week I read a story from Axios about the drop in crime rates. Crime has been in the news because the Trump administration sent a surge of law enforcement personnel to primarily Democratic cities, claiming rising danger. Yet experts say crime has been falling for years. The only notable spike came during Covid, and even that was brief in the larger picture.
My interest in crime is less about the individual deeds than about the social currents underneath them. It fascinates me how something that seems small or unrelated can ripple outward with long-term effects—the proverbial flapping butterfly wing. We look for a single cause, a single fix, even a dramatic purge of one problem or another, but society rarely works that way.
The Axios article cited factors that go well beyond policing and incarceration: gun laws, improved access to mental health care, even the beautification of vacant lots. The gradual phase-out of lead in gasoline, which began in the 1970s, was also mentioned, since lead impairs brain development. At first glance these seem minor, but over time their cumulative effect can reshape communities.
Years ago, I read research suggesting that access to abortion contributed to a drop in juvenile delinquency—an argument that women unwilling or unable to raise children had another option. Controversial, certainly, but another reminder that outcomes we argue about today may develop decades later for reasons we only dimly understand.
When it comes to society, there is no reliable guide and no controlled experiment to prove which thread led where. We do our best with the data we have, aware that causes and consequences tangle together. That uncertainty is unsettling, perhaps—but it is also what makes thinking about these questions so compelling.
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I think about this sometimes, especially when I consider historical accounts of so many criminals. Many of them started down the wrong path because they were hungry. It started with stealing a pie from a windowsill. And before you knew it, they were robbing trains and banks.
Today, the same thing is true. A lot of poor and destitute children start stealing because they need food, or clothes, or shelter. And they stay in that pattern for a lifetime.
On the other side of this are all the reasons crime has been dropping in the United States, here and there. It seems like a cornucopia of causes from all sorts of things. Gun laws. Green space. Mental health awareness. Good causes.
And yet sometimes it feels like every step we take forward, we are forced to take two steps back. Especially with this current administration, whose focus is often misguided. And also fueled by their wish to deceive the American public.
Crime is a hard thing. But I think we should look at it wholly. There is more behind the scenes that we never see or think about. On all sides of this. Cause and effect.
