Brian Stewart: The big crime news is declining violence

In life, as in politics, people like to associate themselves with winning outcomes. Or as U.S. president John Kennedy memorably put it, "Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan."

So isn't it remarkable that no one in authority seems anxious to step up and embrace the truly historic decline in violent crime across Canada and the U.S. in recent years?

To criminologists such as Boston's James Alan Fox, the importance of this trend is glaringly obvious: "The homicide rate, perhaps the single most important marker of civilization's advance or retreat, is dropping through the floor," he says.

Yet this particular victory remains an orphan. You don't find many politicians trumpeting the long-term decline in crime when they're hoping to gain votes by appearing tough.

The police, too, seem to fear that talk of success will lead to their budgets being cut. The same often goes for social agencies. And good news is hardly the media's favourite dish.

As a result, much of the public remains convinced that violence is rising, even as it falls.

But let's be absolutely clear about this: in Toronto, the homicide total last year was 46. That is 40 fewer murders than just four years ago and the lowest number since the mid-1980s.

Metro Vancouver's homicide rate has plunged 42 per cent in the past few years to where it is now the lowest since data became available in 1981.

Washington, D.C., which was being called the "murder capital" of the U.S. not that long ago, has experienced a 70 per cent drop from the peak of 482 two decades ago, to 131 in 2010 and 109 last year, the lowest number in 50 years.

Los Angeles, once ground zero in gang wars, has seen murders plummet by an astonishing one-third in just five years, to a level not seen since 1967 and similar breakthroughs are reported in all but a few big cities.

Clearly, the big crime news is what's not happening.

The leading perpetrators of violent crime, young males, are not killing and assaulting each other nearly as much as they did in the 1980s and '90s.

Teen violence

What's more, this story isn't just about cities. Nationally, Canada's homicide rate, at 1.62 per 100,000, is down to 1966 levels. The overall U.S. murder rate has fallen by nearly half over the past 20 years.

Of course, more can be done, but let's not overlook the fact that the scale of this victory has saved thousands of lives, while rescuing many troubled inner cities from chaos.

This turnaround also raises some serious questions about how further progress might be achieved.

Remember the grim picture the U.S., in particular, faced in the 1990s when the great crack cocaine epidemic left a generation of neglected "feral children" from the inner cities to become "the most murderous cohort of teenagers the country has ever seen."

That was Time magazine's view in 1996, before it went on to warn about the "bloodbath of teenage violence that is lurking in the future."

A bit purply, but the description did not seem exaggerated at the time. Scores of social scientists saw the potential then for our societies simply to be worn down by an unremitting rise in crime in a culture that also seemed obsessed with violence in its entertainment.

What happened?

So how do we explain our surprisingly unheralded deliverance?

Well, there is still some confusion. Most criminologists and social experts are still trying to piece together all parts of this puzzle.

The waning of the crack epidemic was certainly a factor — that and the fact that tougher policing drove most of the open dealing off the streets, which allowed for a more orderly drug trade.

More controversially, some have even claimed that easier access to abortion has led to fewer unwanted and uncared-for children.

But one undeniable breakthrough came with better public policy, the one element governments don't seem to want to pat themselves on the back for these days.

Big city governments across the continent co-operated on finding solutions, which led to best-practices programs such as Toronto 's impressive Anti-Violence Intervention Strategy.

Over the past dozen or so years, police have dropped much of the old bully-boy approach of constant harassment in favour of smarter, more civil and even policing. 

Police now concentrate more on targeted interventions, highly visible street patrols, improved street intelligence, and better two-way communication with local communities.

Violent criminals and gangs know they are under greater surveillance. In urban hot spots, mediation specialists are now commonly called in to cool off gang members after a shooting, to break the usual cycle of retaliation killings (which can account for 60 per cent of homicides).

Isolate the vulnerable

Also, social agencies and schools, helped by impressive armies of volunteers, have adopted more study and recreation programs to help separate the vulnerable from high-crime environments. 

In all of this, the incarceration of violent offenders has played a role, no question.

Still, one of the more encouraging signs is that rates of violence have declined markedly in areas where authorities decided to reduce the amount of juvenile detention. They had concluded that locking up teenagers merely allows them to become better schooled in gang violence.

Studies show that states like Virginia, which cut youth confinement by 40 per cent or more, have seen the sharpest drop in violent crime.

As well, for many reasons, violence seems to be less in fashion now, particularly in those distressed parts of our society where it once carried the day.

None of this is a guarantee that violence will continue to drop. It may spike upwards again in some areas before continuing the long downward trend that criminologists say has been taking place over centuries.

Still, it is hard not to feel that something profound is happening here to make us, collectively, act better.

The UN notes that homicide has also fallen substantially in Europe and Asia in recent decades, too, and that it has been falling in bad economic times as well as good. The sooner we all finally acknowledge this fact, the sooner we may start to understand what it is exactly that we are doing right and build on it.