Crime may rise as recession deepens

Shrinking budgets take down police

WASHINGTON -- Experts say that the next piece of collateral damage from the recession could be a spike in crime, as rising unemployment and widespread law-enforcement budget cuts begin to take their toll.

FBI statistics show that violent crime fell 3.5% nationally in the first six months of last year while property crimes dipped 2.5%.

Final 2008 statistics aren't available yet, but history and anecdotal evidence suggest that an uptick in crime is imminent, if not occurring already.

A Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) survey, released in January, of 233 police departments found that 100 departments -- 43% -- reported rising levels of what they said were recession-related crimes.

Forty percent said thefts had increased in recent months, 39% reported that robberies were up and 32% said burglaries had surged 20%.

That's not surprising, said Richard Rosenfeld, a sociologist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis who studies national crime patterns.

"There's little question that crime rates peak during or, on occasion, immediately after a recessionary period," Rosenfeld said. "And that's been the case for much of the period" after World War II. It's happened in each of the last five recessions, he said.
Public safety gets lean

If crime increases, a wave of public-safety budget cuts will only add to the problem.

"If police departments are already tightening their belts everywhere we look and we are seeing an initial impact on crime, it's quite sobering to think about how things will look six months from now," said Chuck Wexler, executive director of PERF.

Declining sales taxes and property taxes and the subsequent drop in public funds are forcing law enforcement agencies across the country to postpone buying equipment, cut recruitment classes, freeze overtime and redeploy staff to save money:

• In Winthrop, Mass., the chief of police was laid off.

• City officials in St. Paul, Minn., are considering turning off half the city's streetlights -- every other one -- to save $700,000 over two years.

• Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine proposed cutting $72 million in funding for sheriff's departments, a 7% decrease.

• Atlanta police are taking days off without pay every two weeks.

• About 200 Boston police officers might be laid off, the first layoffs since 1982 and only the second layoffs in the department's history.
Unthinkable layoffs

Cutting police officers has been taboo for a long time, but lean finances have erased the stigma.

"Police departments usually are among the last agencies to be cut when the economy turns bad," said Miami Police Chief John Timoney, PERF president. "The fact that most police departments currently are being asked to make cuts is an indication of how badly this recession is affecting local tax bases."

The new economic stimulus measure should help by providing $1 billion to hire about 5,500 local police officers, $2 billion for state and local crime-fighting programs and $1 billion to fight Internet child predators and rural and border crime, and to pay for programs for abused women.

When coupled with the millions of jobs, extended unemployment benefits and other relief that the stimulus law is expected to provide, there's hope that the economic boost alone could help deter crime.

A 2007 report by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that during the Great Depression of the 1930s, relief spending under the New Deal "lowered property crime in a statistically and economically significant way."

The report found that a 10% increase in per-capita relief spending cut the crime rate 5% to 10%.