The Major Cities Chiefs Association recently issued its crime figures for the first half of 2016, and some of the numbers are scary. In four out of five violent crime categories, including murder, the most trustworthy measure, this year is starting off worse than last—and 2015 was more violent than the preceding year. Six out of the ten biggest American cities have seen double-digit increases in 2016; overall, crime is up 14.8 percent. The good news is that murder declined 6.4 percent in New York City and Houston saw a 51.4 percent drop.
Only a pollyanna would pooh-pooh the chiefs’ negative figures and dismiss talk of a new crime rise. Clearly, crime is up, but there’s a big difference between a crime spike or surge, which lasts a year or two, and a true crime boom or wave, which could run for decades. I define a crime wave as a period of sustained high crime, manifested by homicide victimization rates of eight or more per 100,000. Rates over the past few years have been hovering around 5 per 100,000. The last wave, which began at the end of the 1960s and ended in the middle 1990s, ran for two-and-a-half decades, as did the earlier twentieth-century crime boom, which dragged on from 1910 to 1936.
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