Solving America’s Crime

Crime in the United States is currently on the headlines, and not for the reasons we would expect. The FBI recently reported the 2024 reported crimes statistics and actually showed a decrease in murder, aggravated assault, robbery and rape. So why is it in the news? Well, for started, we have seen the Trump administration send the National Guard to four cities across the United States including Los Angeles, Washington D.C, Chicago and Memphis. These deployments have been made in the name of bringing crime down in those cities, most of which had the state governors reject the need to send the National Guard. There was also the potential deployment of troops in Portland, but that was blocked by a judge and some of the other states have pending court cases as well. Nonetheless, this needless escalation from the Trump administration appears, at least to me, to be a blatant authoritarian move to quell those who oppose him and his administration. Now, while his administration claims that this has significantly decreased the rate of crime in those cities, and whether or not this is true is debated, it would make sense for it to be the case. If you have a larger policing force in the area, less crime will be committed. However, we wouldn’t or at least shouldn’t expect to have the National Guard forever policing cities in the U.S. (that is of course unless the Trump administration is attempting to get us used to military force so he can force his power unto us). Not only is it an expensive way of maintaining “safety”, but it is also not very efficient use of our military force who are supposed to protect us from foreign threats and not domestic ones. And so if this administration was thinking of only sending the National Guard for a definitive amount of time, well then, crime will go back to normal once they are retracted as we are not addressing the root cause of the crime in the first place.

So, the question remains, how do we actually solve crime? As I mentioned in the beginning, crime rates were down in 2024, so we are evidently doing something right, but how can we go further? That’s where we turn to economics with a touch of behavioral psychology. A lot of the ideas that I will discuss come from chapter 10 in Jan Brueckner’s Lectures on Urban Economics. In the most fundamental sense, the way to reduce crime is to make it more expensive to commit a crime. Now, there are various ways in which to make this happen, some more evident than others. First, would be to literally increase the cost of committing the crime, which includes increasing the fines assessed when someone commits a crime. Some may argue that this doesn’t really work for white collar crimes in which fines assessed are simply a cost of doing business (i.e. tech companies paying fines for antitrust reasons, banks being fined for taking advantage of customers, etc.), and others would argue that it affects lower income people more. And while those may be good reasons to reconsider assessing fines, I believe they are a decent deterrent for at least certain crimes. Another way of increasing the cost of committing a crime would be to increase the opportunity cost of not doing something else. For instance, let’s say I can make $25/hour recycling catalytic converters that I steal from people’s cars which is higher than the current minimum wage in California, pretty enticing. However, that is not taking into consideration the cost of the risk I am running of potentially getting caught and spending time in prison, or getting caught and getting shot by an owner of the vehicle, both of which doesn’t necessarily have a dollar figure to put into the calculation, but is definitely worth taking into consideration. For a person like me, this is enough to not want to commit that specific crime, but for others, that may be well worth the risk. This leads us to two solutions, we can either increase the minimum wage which would increase the opportunity cost for committing the crime, or we make the risk of getting caught even higher. But there are some things wrong with these two solutions. For one, increasing the minimum wage has its own economic downfalls (increasing the prices of goods sold). And two, increasing the risk of getting caught implies more policing (leading to tensions in the community if not implemented correctly). And so, with most things, the answer lies somewhere in the middle: investing into the community so that people have higher paying jobs either through trades or other means, and implementing a police force that works with the community, while also generating a sense of pride in the community amongst the inhabitants so that they feel inclined to keep their neighborhood safe.