The 1970s Crime Wave

In this final installment of their series on the 1970s, Alex and Tyler turn to the social upheaval and crime wave that marked the decade as one of America’s most turbulent. They explore how rising crime rates transformed cities, fueled a national sense of fear, and led to far-reaching policy shifts, including mass incarceration and changes in urban policing. From the shocking statistics on homicide and stranger violence to the rise of serial killers and political bombings, they consider how the era’s unprecedented violence influenced American culture and policy. The conversation concludes with a caution against complacency, as they reflect on how fragile today’s low-crime environment may be—and what lessons from the past should guide us in preserving it. 

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ALEX TABARROK: Welcome, everyone, to the Marginal Revolution Podcast. Tyler, in our first two podcasts on the 1970s, we dealt with two measures of societal dysfunction: inflation, and then also price controls, and the energy crisis. I think for most people in the street, the biggest measure of dysfunction in the 1970s was the increase in crime. It’s really hard for us in the 2000s, I think, to actually grasp how big the increase in crime was. America really became a much more dangerous place in the 1960s and the 1970s.

This crime wave led to massive increases in policing and prisons, which themselves impact social policy. We’re dealing with the consequences of the increase in crime in the 1970s even today. But let’s begin with a few facts. Between 1960 and 1980, the homicide rate doubled, and the violent crime rate, as measured by police reports, more than tripled. Now, to put this in perspective, if the homicide rate had not increased between 1960 and 1991, when it peaked, there would have been 200,000 fewer murder victims, and more than 20 million fewer victims of violent crime.

That’s an awful lot of pain and agony. The new violence, the violence of the 1970s was also more impersonal than previous violence. Homicide rates doubled, but homicide rates by strangers increased much faster, especially in the big cities. Now, to be sure, it’s always been the case that if you’re going to be murdered, it’s probably by someone you know just because those are the people that you have beefs with. To the same extent, if you’re not hanging out with young men, and it’s a little bit hard to say, but especially young Black men, then you can avoid a lot of that. Stranger violence, however, was newer, more difficult to avoid, and it generated more fear.

Robberies, for example, which might lead to injury or murder, increased by a factor of four between 1960 and 1980. By the time that violent crime peaked in 1991, there were, according to the National Victimization Survey, 34 million crimes in that year, 34 million, including 6.4 million violent crimes like rape and robbery, aggravated assault, 12.5 million crimes of personal theft, and over 15 million household crimes like burglary. People became afraid to walk at night, whites and middle-class Blacks moved out of the cities and into the suburbs, often leaving the inner cities even more dangerous than they were before. Gated communities came into vogue. Private security services became more common.

People demanded the right to protect themselves. It took time, but I think that the Shall-Issue gun laws, which started to become more popular in the 1980s and 1990s, I think they were a response to the high crime rates of the 1970s. It wasn’t just what one might call peer-to-peer ordinary violence, a lot of other extraordinary violence increased as well.

TYLER COWEN: Serial killers, for instance, they became a thing. Starting in the 1950s, the notion that there was a person who would go around, typically killing strangers in some kind of sequence with a motif or a common pattern. Then the person would have some name in the media, Son of Sam. 

TABARROK: Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Charles Manson.

COWEN: The Zodiac Killer.

TABARROK: The Zodiac Killer.

COWEN: It was a thing, and this is literally insane but insane in the looser usage of the term. If you’re going to be criminal, why would you do it that way? What’s the return? The common pattern, you would think the chance you would be caught is much higher, but nonetheless, something, a contagion effect kicked in. In a world where some people were serial killers, some number of others more decided they would be serial killers, too. We see the same thing with assassinations in the data. Very often political assassinations, they tend to feed upon each other: someone is assassinated, and then other people get the idea. It’s a demonstration effect. You get your name in the paper this way.

TABARROK: John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy.

COWEN: Yes, and it goes on. Bombings also. In the 1960s, early ’70s bombings are extremely common. It depends how you define a bombing, but in the data, there’s basically more than one a day in the United States. Some are from causes people just don’t talk much about anymore. Puerto Rican independence was a common source of both bombing threats and actual bombs going off. I think, again, there was a contagion effect. Now, serial killers start to dwindle by the 1990s, it’s a much lower number than you had in the ’60s and the ’70s, the contagion effect is gone. We don’t seem to understand these turning points very well, but just random violence was a much greater risk.

I recall my own life, again, I’m growing up in the 1970s, right outside of New York City. I frequently go to New York, there was basically no part of town where I considered myself completely safe, even Upper East Side, which now we would think of, it’s just so boring, you wouldn’t go there. Then it was the risk was not totally eliminated by any means. In terms of people’s well-being and also how they voted, I think crime is yet bigger issue than even its measured economic costs would indicate. This truly was the era of American crime, in many ways, whether it’s serial killers, or assassinations, or burglaries, or being mugged on the street, or whatever else. It was a fundamentally different world.

I still have the programming of someone who grew up in a high-crime era. If I’m in another country, which still might be a dangerous place, I wouldn’t say I feel at ease, but I don’t feel that much not at ease because I’m still somewhat used to it. The notion of, “Is it safe enough to walk here?” I feel I’ve confronted that decision many times. It’s very different than, I think, how people respond to that if they grew up somewhat later. You, of course, grew up in Canada.

TABARROK: Yes. I did.

COWEN: You don’t have this at all, do you?

TABARROK: I did grow up in Canada, but early, this would be early in the 1980s, where it wasn’t at its peak, I made a trip with a girlfriend to New York, and we came in on the train. The train had to be stopped before we got to the Grand Central Station or whatever it was, where we were going. There was some problem. We had to get off the train and switch to the metro. We get off the train, and there’s people on the street with fires in the gas cans.

COWEN: Of course.

TABARROK: Fires on the street. We get on the subway, the metro, and of course, the graffiti everywhere. My girlfriend and I thought that, “This is New York, we are getting the New York experience.” We did see some of that.

COWEN: I think it’s very early ’90s when crime is turning down in New York City, but the ’70s felt the most dangerous.

TABARROK: Absolutely.

COWEN: Because by the early ’90s, there were many places you can go and just be fine, and that’s what you would do. The ’70s was no-holds-barred, anything could happen.

TABARROK: The number of bombings, as you said, there were, in 1970, 278 bombings, 278. In 1991, there were seven. Bombing would be a big deal today. Almost a bombing a day. All of these crazy leftist groups, not all leftist groups, but a bunch of leftist groups. One of my favorites was the New World Liberation Front, you remember these guys?

COWEN: It sounds familiar.

TABARROK: They were California guys. There’s 78 bombings. They were my favorite because the New World Liberation Front, they demanded free utilities for the poor and the elderly, but to make their case, they mostly bombed the Pacific Gas and Electric utility towers, which seems a strange thing to do if you want free utilities for the poor, but that’s what they did. They were never caught, but most people think this was a guy, Ronald Huffman, Revolutionary Ron, and his longtime partner, Maureen Hinton. Huffman later murdered Hinton with an axe. 

COWEN: Plane hijackings was another hard-to-conceive-of crime, not to crash them into buildings, which of course happened later, to take the plane and make demands. It seems to me like a very poor strategy or sometimes the demand would be, “Fly me to Cuba.” Again, some contagion effect where once it’s the thing in the news you get more of it.

TABARROK: There was a story I read recently that Allen Funt, you remember Allen Funt?

COWEN: Yes, Candid Camera.

TABARROK: Candid Camera. Yes. He was on a plane and the plane was hijacked. Because he was on the plane no one believed. “Oh, this must be because we are on Candid Camera. Are we on Candid Camera because Allen Funt is on the plane?” He says, “No, no, no.” Only once they got off the tarmac in Cuba, did they realize, “Oh, we’re not on Candid Camera.”

COWEN: That’s right.

TABARROK: The Weather Underground. Weather Underground, they were the original wokes.

COWEN: “Don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” Great Bob Dylan line.

TABARROK: Yes. Anti-imperialist, anti-racist. They believe that all white babies were tainted with the original sin of skin privilege. In other words, white privilege. They bombed the US Capitol, the Department of State, the Pentagon. Weather Underground, they bombed the Pentagon, incredible. They usually gave advanced warnings of their bombs, although they committed a lot of property damage. The only people they ended up killing were three of their members when they accidentally blew themselves up in a townhouse in Greenwich Village. 

But that was the time. 

New York City as poster child for crime in the 1970s  

TABARROK: Then New York. New York epitomized, symbolized the rise in crime, the chaos of the 1970s. Between 1960 and 1972, murder rates rose by a factor of four to nearly five murders per day in New York. The fires. Do you remember the fires?

COWEN: Of course.

TABARROK: More than 40 fires per day. 10,000 fires year after year.

COWEN: You couldn’t go to Newark in those times without seeing a fire basically.

TABARROK: Wow.

COWEN: Newark and fires was a thing.

TABARROK: Yes. I remember again, growing up in Toronto, where we would always laugh because there would  be a fire in Tonawanda or Buffalo in the news—you get the American news—and there’s always fires over there. We didn’t understand it. Some parts of the Bronx lost more than 97% of their buildings to fire and abandonment between 1970 and 1980. 250,000 people lost their homes. This is where the pictures that you see of New York looking like a little war zone, they come from this period.

COWEN: I used to take friends on a tour in my car through the South Bronx. I was like, “For your education to be complete, we need to go see this,” and some people would refuse to come.

TABARROK: Sure.

COWEN: Those were eye-openers, especially 1982 or so, I did a whole bunch of tours with people. You wouldn’t get out of the car. Simply, it was not an option.

TABARROK: Right. The fires were in part due to arson. The rent controls meant that the landlords couldn’t earn a return from the buildings, and so they stopped maintaining the buildings. In the worst cases, the buildings were abandoned to looters and gangs and perhaps burned down for insurance reasons. I think that’s actually overdone, however, that story, which is a pretty common story. Because most of the arsons were not done for money. They were just done for the thrill of it. Then, in fact, most of the arsons were not done for money, and most of the fires were not due to arson.

Most of the fires were due to overcrowding, cooking, more trash, poor wiring. Then New York is going bankrupt. They’re not putting the money into the fire services. You get the crime, the fires, the abandoned buildings, this sense of doom.

COWEN: That’s right.

TABARROK: In one of the weirdest episodes, travelers arriving at New York City airports in June of 1975, a bunch of people were handing out these pamphlets, “Welcome to Fear City.” It’s a pamphlet—you can Google it—with death’s head on the cover as a survival guide, and it says, “Stay off the streets after 6:00 p.m. Even in midtown Manhattan, muggings and occasional murders are on the increase during the early evening hours. Avoid public transportation. Never ride the subway for any reason whatsoever. Police and fire protection in other areas of the city is grossly inadequate. It will become more inadequate. In the South Bronx, which is known to police officers as Fort Apache, arson has become an uncontrollable problem. Good luck.”

The amazing thing is these pamphlets were being handled out by something called the Council for Public Safety. It was actually off-duty police officers and firefighters, and they’re handing out these things as a way to force the mayor to bargain with them for higher salaries. Of course, the actual result was to frighten the tourists away and greatly reduce city revenues, but they weren’t entirely wrong even if they did exaggerate.

COWEN: It also seemed like it would never end. I think that’s an important part of what was happening. There were no signs of anything turning the corner. People started accepting it is normal. I think people back then, they’re shocked to see how New York City has evolved more recently.

TABARROK: It didn’t end there. That’s when the lights went out, right?

COWEN: That’s right.

TABARROK: July 13th, 1977, the entirety of New York City loses power. Lights went out, the subway stopped, the elevators paused, everything shut down. Almost immediately, the looting began, right?

COWEN: Of course.

TABARROK: Frenzy of looting. Kids today, they probably don’t know, but films like The Purge: Anarchy, in which there’s one night of lawlessness, this really recounts what actually happened in New York City. People just seemed to take the lights out as a signal to go crazy. 

COWEN: No one thought that was weird when it happened. “Of course, they’re going to take things.”

TABARROK: Yes. It’s the signal. Brooklyn, they’re backing up their cars into the stores. They’re tying ropes around the store grates. They’re pulling the grates away. In the Bronx, one car dealership, they lost 50 Pontiacs. Smashed the glass, drove the cars out. Then the arsonists are burning things. They’re adding to the chaos. The mayor, who was Abe Beame, called it a night of terror. Then, as you had mentioned earlier, you had the serial killers. This is the same time where the Son of Sam is wandering the streets. This is classic. He’s writing these letters to Jimmy Breslin, I think it was, right?

COWEN: I think so. The New York Daily News would publish them.

TABARROK: Exactly. These letters, it’s something—again, you want to understand the Joker, this is the Joker. Quote, “Hello from the gutters of New York City, which are filled with dog manure, vomit, stale wine, urine, and blood. Hello from the sewers of New York City, which swallow up these delicacies when they are washed away by the sweeper trucks. Hello from the cracks in the sidewalks of New York City.”

COWEN: He needed a Twitter account, right?

TABARROK: Yes. “From the ants that dwell in these cracks and feed in the dried blood of the dead that has settled into the cracks.” He would be on Twitter today. He would be on Twitter today. 

The rise of mass incarceration 

TABARROK: What do we make of all of this? I think one of the things that is important to understand is people think that mass incarceration is a peculiarly American phenomena, or that it came out of nowhere, or was due solely to racism. Michelle Alexander’s, The New Jim Crow, takes his view. In fact, the United States was not a mass incarceration society in the 1960s.

It became one in the 1980s and 1990s due to the crime wave of the 1970s. It was not simply due to racism. It is true Blacks do commit more crimes relative to their population than whites, but Blacks are also overrepresented as victims. The simple fact of the matter is that Black victims of crime, the majority group, demanded more incarceration of Black criminals. In 1973, the NAACP demanded that the government lengthen minimum prison terms for muggers, pushers, and first-degree murders.

The Black newspaper, the Amsterdam News, advocated mandatory life sentences for “the non-addict drug pusher of hard drugs.” The Black columnist, Carl Rowan, wrote that “locking up thugs is not vindictive.” Eric Holder, under Obama, he was the secretary of—

COWEN: Of something.

TABARROK: Yes, of something. He called for stop and frisk. Eric Holder called for stop and frisk. Back then, the criminal justice system was also called racist, but the racism that people were pointing to was that Black criminals were let back on the streets to terrorize Black victims, and that Black criminals were given sentences which were too light. That was the criticism back then. It was Black and white victims together who drove the punishment of criminals. I think this actually tells you about two falsehoods. First, the primary driver of mass imprisonment was not racism. It was violent crime.

Second, this also puts the lie, sometimes you hear from conservatives, to this idea that Black leaders don’t care about Black-on-Black crime. That’s a lie. Many Black leaders have been, and were, and are tough on crime. Now, it’s true, as crime began to fall in the 1990s, many Blacks and whites began to have misgivings about mass incarceration. Crime was a huge problem in the 1970s and 1980s, and it hit the United States like a brick. It seemed to come out of nowhere. You can’t blame people for seeking solutions, even if the solutions come with their own problems. 

Conventional explanations for the rise in crime

TABARROK: We had this massive increase in crime in the 1960s and the 1970s, into the 1990s. Why? Why did this happen? It sure would be nice, Tyler, if we had a simple monocausal explanation of the great crime wave of the 1970s, but I think we’re going to have to do some handwaving, and in the end then maybe an important takeaway.

COWEN: I have some hypotheses that I think you’re underrating, but first talk about what you think, and then I’ll add in my bits. I agree, it’s very hard with available data to really pin it down. There’s decent data on crime, right? This is quite puzzling.

TABARROK: Yes.

COWEN: Some of this might be due to contagion effects. When contagion effects are strong, small initial nudges off a path can have a big final effect, and that makes these causal relationships hard to measure.

TABARROK: Exactly right. I’m going to put a lot of weight on that as we get to the end. 

Well, let’s go through first a few of the conventional explanations. One is that there was an increase in the number of young people, right? Crime is a young person’s game. It’s true that between 1960 and 1980, the share of the population of people 15-24, increased from about 13 percent to almost 19 percent. However, when you look at the number of the crimes, the increase in crime caused by young people, and you multiply that by the increase in the number of young people, you get maybe an increase of 10 percent to 20 percent. Steve Levitt had a paper on this.

COWEN: This we more or less know. This is one of the things that’s fairly well established, right?

TABARROK: Exactly.

COWEN: We can measure it.

TABARROK: Yes, we can measure that. When you measure it, it just doesn’t add up. It doesn’t get you to four and five times.

COWEN: It gets you somewhere.

TABARROK: It gets you somewhere.

COWEN: Yes.

TABARROK: Yes. As you said, maybe it gets you that push, right? 

Second thing is declining punishment. The fact of the matter is that the expected punishment for crime is and always has been pretty low. To be punished, a criminal has to be arrested. We know that right off the bat, most crimes are not even reported, and of those that are reported, most don’t result in an arrest, and even fewer in a conviction.

Moreover, as crime was rising in the United States in the 1970s, punishment was declining. Between 1960 and 1970, when crime was rising, the number of prisoners per capita was flat, or in many states falling. In New York State, for example, the number of crimes went up by a factor of more than five, but the prison population fell by 25 percent. More generally, crime went up faster than the prison population increased.

In 1960, for every 100 crimes, there were six prisoners. By 1970, that had fallen to two. Only beginning in the 1980s does the number of prisoners begin to catch up. By the early 1990s, we were back to six prisoners for every 100 crimes. Then as the crime rate began to decline, the number of prisoners kept increasing. By 2020, it was about 18 prisoners for every 100 crimes, and only very recently has that number begun to fall. I think that expected punishments were falling as crime was rising. Now this one is a little bit tricky, because what’s cause and what’s effect.

COWEN: Exactly. This one, I’m not so convinced on being important. It must be an effect, but if we had these same numbers in Norway, we’d be ho-hum, right?

TABARROK: Maybe, yes. As I said, it could be cause, it could be effect. Clearly, it could be cause in that if expected punishments go down, people commit more crimes, but also what was going on, was that the criminal justice system was becoming overwhelmed. I have a paper on this which says, think about a crime wave like a riot. Why does a riot happen?

It happens because suddenly people realize they’re in a group of people committing crimes, they’re less likely to be caught. You can have multiple equilibria: if nobody riots and then if somebody commits a crime they’re put in jail and so they don’t commit the crime. But if everybody riots, then it’s hard to put them all in jail, hard to capture them all, hard to devote the police resources.

COWEN: Throw a rock at a cop, right?

TABARROK: Yes.

COWEN: He and seventeen other people are doing it in the three-minute span.

TABARROK: Exactly. An increase in crime generates a secondary increase in crime as expected punishments fall, so maybe that’s part of it; it became overwhelmed. Another possibility, one which has been talked about recently, is lead. This one is mostly focused actually on why crime fell in the 1990s. The argument is that lead—this part we know is true—lead, if you ingest it, you get it in the blood, you get it in your brain, and so forth, it makes people less capable of self-regulation. They lose control over their emotions, reduces IQ. 

We began to get rid of lead. We phased it out in the late 1970s and 1980s. It was banned in gasoline in 1996. The idea is that while the people who grew up in the unleaded gasoline era, they were less criminal-like, they were less criminogenic, they were able to regulate their emotions, had a higher IQ and so forth. That is the explanation, or one possible explanation, for the decline in crime in the 1990s.

It’s less clear that lead can explain the increase in crime in the 1970s, but at least it’s semiplausible that lead poisoning increased with a lot more automobiles, a lot more children growing up in the 1950s, in the 1960s, exposed to lead paint, exposed to pollution from the lead in the gasoline and so forth. Maybe.

COWEN: It’s probably a factor, but I always worry that the cross-national evidence and the time series are not falling under a single model. People who think that’s the main thing going on, I’m not convinced of that.

TABARROK: Yes. I think there’s some evidence for it both cross-nationally and the time series. The time series lines up very nicely. The cross-national evidence, it’s not bad, but, yes, I agree. I think even if you push this as far as it can go, it explains again some of the increase, but definitely not the massive flowering of crime, which we had.

I’d also put some weight on the movement from rural to urban areas. You had a lot of people in the 1950s through to the 1970s moving to urban areas, a lot of Blacks from the South. They moved to the cities and there’s increased anonymity. Urban life is more criminal-like. The cities, they just weren’t prepared.

COWEN: You see this in emerging economies today. A place like Nigeria, where rural areas might be quite safe, not always but some, and then people go to the city, and all the social bonds are broken, and people are starting from scratch.

TABARROK: Exactly, yes. There’s fewer eyes on the street. There isn’t the grandma who is making sure that you’re staying on the straight and true. I think that has something to do with it as well. If you put all of this together, can you explain the rise and fall of crime? Sort of, right? I think this is where we’re going to have to handwave, right?

Unconventional explanations for the rise in crime

COWEN: Yes. I’ll give you two more intuitions if you’re done with those.

TABARROK: Yes, give us the intuitions.

COWEN: To be clear, I’m not saying these are confirmed by the literature, but I don’t think they’re refuted by the literature either. The first—I actually hate this word, but I’ll say it anyway—deindustrialization. Everyone talks about New York, but New Jersey is in a way a cleaner laboratory. Their cities, small cities, go look at them.

If I think of, say, Paterson, New Jersey, earlier had been a very safe place, but Paterson’s economy was based on textile mills, other kinds of manufacturing. That is lost at first to the US South, a bit later on to other countries with lower-wage labor, standard story, and Paterson becomes highly dangerous. I watched Paterson over some of those years, and it just seemed it was the delta in the economy of Paterson, and you had pushed people into an urbanized existence, which was fine when it was prosperous, but they’re locked into urbanization. Then the main livelihood is vanishing, and there’s a delta effect, the change is negative, and it just feeds on itself.

Then there’s also New York City nearby, which was not a wonderful influence, but you have these minilabs where you see crime going up a lot when the local economy is hurt. It’s not going to explain all the country, all the trend. I fully get that, but it seems to be something that with one’s own eyes, one could see.

TABARROK: Then crime kills the local economy.

COWEN: Of course. New York City also, it’s striking to me, that becomes an especially dangerous place, as does Detroit. Those were two of the highest-wage places in the US when they were safe. Deindustrialization, which again, might only be to the US South in its early stages, but it’s coming first to high wage places. The semiparadox, why would the richest parts of America have the biggest upticks in crime? I think that is one partial reason.

The other factor, and this I actually do think is the single biggest factor, though I’m not going to say it’s 50 percent, but just addictive drugs. Those hit the United States in a big way. They become more potent. They’re distributed more readily. Some of it is that people will steal to get money for drugs. That’s a noticeable effect, but I think the bigger effect over time is fights to control who has the rights to sell those drugs, and just changes in the local market for how much conflict is there over the right to sell those drugs across gangs, across mafias.

So many crimes you see, say, during the ’70s, they’re drug-related over the territory, the turf, the mafias. Again, this is without statistical confirmation, but the single biggest effect, I think is the drug trade, and how the drug trade changed and became more potent. Then you also have these crime foot soldiers. They need their fix. They’re a bit beholden to the gang boss or the mafia boss, so that there’s a supply side effect, there’s a demand side effect, and it all just feeds together. It also breaks up families, which with a bit of a lag contributes to high crime as well. More kids raised outside of two-parent families, which are stable. That’s my number one hypothesis.

TABARROK: I agree. Certainly, the influence of crack, which is a little bit later, but that is when all these movies, the New Jack City, all those movies come out, drive-by shootings. That seems very closely connected.

COWEN: ’70s is often heroin, not crack.

TABARROK: Yes. I wondered if the ’70s can be explained by the same.

COWEN: Ports become more corrupt. That’s the independent measure of high crime, because the heroine is coming in through ports, at least then. Not proof of anything.

TABARROK: That’s The Wire, right?

COWEN: Yes. 

TABARROK: Yes, I agree with that. The other thing which I would add to it, which I think you had brought up at the very beginning, is culture, social interactions. I would put it this way, which I know is a bit ridiculous, but crime exploded because crime exploded.

COWEN: Absolutely.

TABARROK: Sounds like a tautology.

COWEN: I’m fully on board.

TABARROK: If your friends are doing crime, you do crime as well.

COWEN: That’s right, just like economics.

TABARROK: Yes. I think also about culture, right? Think about drinking and driving, right? Drinking and driving is a thing where things have gotten better. Drinking and driving used to be much more common than it is today.

COWEN: Much more.

TABARROK: Much more. What changed?

COWEN: Even just drinking, right?

TABARROK: Sure.

COWEN: For that matter, driving, the young people, either one.

TABARROK: That’s very recent, but yes.

COWEN: Yes, but you’re stacking a number of contagion effects here.

TABARROK: Exactly. Well, what changed? Well, you could say the penalties changed, and that’s for sure, but something else changed. Drinking and driving, that used to be something that normal people did every now and then.

COWEN: It would be jokes in sitcoms.

TABARROK: Yes, absolutely.

COWEN: Like, “Oh, he’s going to drive home drunk,” and they’re all, “Ha ha ha. What a silly boy.”

TABARROK: Yes. You could be an upstanding member in the community and still drive a little drunk every now and then, and people would look the other way. Mothers Against Drunk Driving, they made it not just a crime to drive drunk, but a social taboo. Right?

COWEN: Right.

TABARROK: The higher penalties worked alongside social disapproval. Drunk driving is just no longer something that normal upstanding members of the community do. Only reprobates do it, right.

COWEN: Yes.

The possibility of future crime waves 

TABARROK: I think this is an illustration that social disapproval and putting it the other way, social approval. If your friends are doing crime, you do crime. It becomes normal. Peer effects can amplify other changes. I think what bothers me about this is that it’s inherently a bit pessimistic. 

COWEN: Or very optimistic because you can get big improvements quickly, which in fact we did.

TABARROK: Okay. I guess so. Speaking in a low-crime time, which we are today, it says that with the right triggers, we could experience another crime wave.

COWEN: I strongly believe that. The same is true with assassinations, I’m sorry to say.

TABARROK: Yes, assassinations. We are speaking after the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. I think it’s very surprising that they have not come back. I wouldn’t at all be surprised if assassinations became much more common, if only because it’s so much easier today, like with a drone.

COWEN: It will be, yes. Consumer drone off-the-shelf.

TABARROK: Absolutely. Absolutely.

COWEN: Tamper with it.

TABARROK: Why this kid is using a rifle—

COWEN: The incompetence of the criminals is a huge benefactor of us all. We don’t know much about this kid at the moment, but it seems his competence level was poor. He even what? He tried to take one of those range finders in through the entrance and they spotted it. Now a professional KGB assassin, he’s going to figure it out some other way.

TABARROK: Well, here we had multiple incompetences though.

COWEN: It was the lawmakers and the criminals.

TABARROK: Yes.

COWEN: One thing I like about the drugs hypothesis, to me, it explains Mexico very, very well. Mexico was a very safe country for the most part, reasonably recently. Even I think what, less than 10 years ago, there were fewer murders per capita in Yucatán, part of southern Mexico, than in Finland. Now Mexican crime goes up as the drug trade goes up. When it’s a stable semimonopoly, the murder rate then goes down. When they’re contesting territory, the rates go up. Now, Mexico and the US, they’re very different, but you do see a laboratory, where just by far the biggest changes in murder rates, crime rates, have to do with what’s going on in the drug trade.

TABARROK: If it’s mostly the drug trade, then that’s a pretty strong argument for more drug legalization.

COWEN: Well, it’s a little complicated because you need to legalize drugs in a way that puts the cartels and the gangs out of business.

TABARROK: Sure.

COWEN: When we legalized marijuana in some places, or decriminalized it, we didn’t do that. There are all these taxes, regulations. More people are still buying illegally. Those problems have not gone away as much as we had hoped. If you have heroin for sale in Walmart, I’m sure that puts the cartels out of business.

TABARROK: Exactly.

COWEN: I just don’t think we’re going to do that, putting aside whether or not we should.

TABARROK: You buy drugs at the pharmacy, right?

COWEN: Well—

TABARROK: Not since Al Capone do we see the alcohol sellers duking it out with the drive-by shootings.

COWEN: That’s right, but whether you can take all the potent drugs we have now, which are getting more potent, you just have them be very cheap and available, fully legally advertised wherever, I just don’t think we’re going to do it.

TABARROK: Coming back to this idea about contagion, I think about motor vehicle theft. This worries me because motor vehicle theft fell dramatically in the 1990s. Why? Well, it’s pretty easy to see why actually. It’s because you had these car immobilizer devices and other security devices. It just became harder to steal a car. This timing fits multiple countries. As you see the immobilizers being put into place, then you see car thefts go down and they go down in just the cars which got the immobilizers first and so forth.

Then in the 2020s, it’s discovered that some Kia’s and Hyundai’s don’t have immobilizers, and the theft of these cars explodes by a factor of five to 10 in some cities. If you think that, as one theory has it that, either it was decline in lead, or the rise of abortion, both of these theories, the lead theory and the abortion theory, say that we have less crime because we have fewer criminal types. Yet as soon as it’s discovered that Kia’s and Hyundai’s don’t have immobilizers, theft of those goes way, way up. There seems to be a lot of potential criminality still there under the roof.

COWEN: Is it harder to get away with being a serial killer today, that there’s more financial infrastructure, potentially more witnesses, easier to track people, policing is more of a science, DNA evidence? That’s my hunch, is that it’s harder. There are people who aspire to be serial killers, but they’re caught on the first or second killing, and then the contagion effect goes away.

TABARROK: Yes and no, because what has happened, we’ve had fewer serial killers, but more parallel killers, right? Well, what’s a parallel killer? Well, that’s a mass shooting. The data here aren’t that great, but as far as we can tell, mass shootings where more than four people are killed in a single incident, they’ve gone up dramatically from one to two per year in the 1980s and 1990s, to 10 or 12 per year. Again, I grew up in Canada, but—

COWEN: We’ll get to that in a minute, but it’s just a way of committing suicide also. Suicide rates are higher, correlates of suicide, that’s a kind of suicide. You’re not like, “Oh, I can’t be a mass shooter. The DNA evidence will get me.” That’s irrelevant.

TABARROK: Right, exactly, exactly. You’ve got more parallel killers. Again, that says that the potentiality of criminals, criminality is still there. It’s just hiding.

COWEN: Why is Canada so safe? Tell us, beloved Canada.

TABARROK: Why is Canada so safe?

COWEN: It’s urbanized, right?

TABARROK: Yes.

COWEN: A lot of immigrants now.

TABARROK: A lot of immigrants. Immigrants in Canada—

COWEN: I’m not saying they necessarily spur crime, but it’s not your grandfather’s Canada either.

TABARROK: No, that’s true. Immigrants in the United States and Canada both actually tend to have lower criminal rates. That’s not true in Europe. It may be that we get a better class of immigrants in Canada and the United States. I think the main factors are two. One, we do have stronger gun control laws. I’ve always been a little bit of a whiff on those things.

COWEN: Your knife murders are way lower too, right? 

TABARROK: Yes, maybe. Again, this is hard to say, but it is true that crime, particularly violent crime, is very prevalent among young African American men. Something like half of the murders, it varies by year, but approximately half of the homicides are created by 12 percent of the population. Actually, 6 percent of the population if you think that they’re all men.

COWEN: Even if we compare, say, whites to whites, or pick your group, Canada is still going to have much lower crime of almost any sort.

TABARROK: Well, we didn’t have a revolution, so that tells you that we weren’t quite so willing to take up arms.

COWEN: You selected on a different basis?

TABARROK: Selected on a different basis. We didn’t have the Scots-Irish so much, coming from the borderlands. 

COWEN: Fewer people have military training. I don’t know if that’s a factor, but you’re less comfortable with guns and violence.

TABARROK: Yes, that’s for sure. Yes, that’s for sure. I don’t know, colder weather? 

COWEN: It could be, yes.

TABARROK: Yes, right.

COWEN: What’s the seasonality of typical New York City violent crime? I have the intuition it goes up a lot in the summer. Is that corrrect?

TABARROK: Yes, absolutely. Again, think about when the lights went out in New York in 1973. That’s in the middle of the summer. It is hot. This is when the Son of Sam murderer is out, right? People are just crazy. This is before a lot of air-conditioning. I think the heat just makes people crazy, especially if they don’t have access to some air-conditioning. I think it does reduce emotional regulation, reduces emotional control. Yes, there’s a lot of things. We have fewer assassinations, too, right?

COWEN: Well, there’s less at stake, but yes.

TABARROK: Speak for yourself.

COWEN: Canadian policy doesn’t change that much, and it doesn’t affect the rest of the world that much.

TABARROK: No, of course.

COWEN: It’s less ideologically fraught, if only for those reasons, though for other reasons too.

TABARROK: Yes. Then, of course, we have all of the consequences, which we’re not going to get into this time. I think we have gone overboard on mass incarceration in the United States. I personally like to see less, but I understand it. I don’t want to return to the 1970s, so I think we should be careful in dismantling mass incarceration. At least we should do it in a way which keeps expected punishments high.

While I would put less emphasis on prisons, I would double the number of police officers in the United States. This is an underpoliced country. Surprising, but it’s an underpoliced country. Now, we can’t do that overnight.

COWEN: How much do you have to raise the wage, or lower the standard for the IQ test?

TABARROK: I think there is enough people in the United States who would find a job as a police officer appealing, especially if we can get back to a situation where this is a relatively high-status job, and where you can think about your job as being heroic “to serve and protect.” For very good reasons, we have put a lot of pressure and attention on the police. We should have done it earlier, but we put a lot of pressure on the police, and monitoring them for racism and so forth. They do need to be monitored, but at the same time, we absolutely want policing to be a high-status profession.

COWEN: What if it’s a job where to do it well, or even middling okay, you actually do have to break the law some of the time. Your partner will overlook that on a very regular basis, but once you’re monitored, you’re stuck. The response is the better people just move out of the job. I’m all for your idea, but I don’t really see how we’re going to do it. Now, we could double the wage, something like that would work. I don’t want to lower the IQ requirement. Let’s leave that there.

TABARROK: Sure.

COWEN: It’s going to cost a lot of money. 

TABARROK: I think one of the things which increased crime in the 1970s was we did put a lot of rules onto the police and onto the courts. The Miranda warnings, for example, that came in the 1960s. 

COWEN: Can’t they just put them online somewhere and call it done? Here’s a TikTok channel. 

TABARROK: Yes, people can almost repeat it.

COWEN: It’s on TV so much.

TABARROK: Yes, exactly, yes. We did something very, very peculiar, I think, which was that if you didn’t give Miranda, or if you gathered your evidence in an illegal way, we threw out the case.

COWEN: That’s insane.

TABARROK: Yes, that doesn’t make any sense, right? Why does the criminal get to get away when the police officer did something wrong? By all means, punish the police officers, but why that should benefit the criminals is very, very peculiar. Maybe it was the only thing the courts thought they could enforce. Maybe just punishing the police officers is too hard.

Where I’m going with this is that, yes, we put on all these restrictions on the police and on the courts, and it took time. It took time to get used to that, but I think the police and the courts have developed responses. It is still possible to have a strong police force, which is a legal police force. It doesn’t happen overnight. It’s not that easy. You need a new style of policing, but there are other things we can do as well. I’m not a big fan of the surveillance society, but just having more cameras around, that has definitely reduced crime, even cellphones, right?

COWEN: Sure. People in neighborhoods want them, whether we agree with that preference or not.

TABARROK: Exactly.

COWEN: I would want them if my neighborhood had crime, more crime than it does.

TABARROK: Yes, yes. Even things like putting more lighting at night, hotspot policing. It’s amazing the amount of crime which happens in a small number of places by a small number of people.

COWEN: El Salvador, right?

TABARROK: Yes.

COWEN: Shows this.

TABARROK: Yes, but even in New York City.

COWEN: I’m going there next week, by the way.

TABARROK: Well, it’s much better now.

COWEN: Better than when we went, yes.

TABARROK: Yes, much better than when we went.

COWEN: Well, less crime. We’ll see if it’s better.

TABARROK: Less crime, yes. Even you can get down in a city down to an intersection, and a huge amount of crime will occur at that intersection. We only discovered this really after crime stats, after introducing statistics and collecting a lot more data.

COWEN: Everyone in Newark, New Jersey knew this, their whole lives right. It’s like, don’t go there. They’ll talk about somewhere very specific.

TABARROK: Yes, but there’s something about having it in numbers formalized on a map, which allows the police to direct the resources. Anyway, my point is, is that we put a lot of these restrictions on the police force. We also, technology has given them more tools. I think it is possible to have a police force which is both effective, and which is respectful of minorities, and which respects people’s rights, and doesn’t just beat up the troublemakers.

COWEN: I worry about this though, especially in a nation with so many guns. You approach a suspect. Unless you’re an idiot, you’re just always extremely nervous as a policeman. How that shapes your incentives and the ways in which our legal system does not deploy discretion in a way that it used to, that was both good and bad. Very good and very bad. Now we’re locked into something more procedural. I’m not sure how well we can get out of that box. See what I’m saying?

TABARROK: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. The guy who was walking the beat, he knew who the bums were, right?

COWEN: He would deal with them in some way. The neighborhood accepted it, and they let him do it.

TABARROK: Exactly. They never went to court.

COWEN: He went to high school with the judge.

TABARROK: Exactly, yes. Now, I think there’s some truth to that, but the same time, I think we’ve actually gone overboard on this idea that the police are always in fear of their lives. This is what they’re taught. In fact, being an electrician is more dangerous than being a police officer. I think we need to get back to a situation where the police are not told, “You’re an invading force.” This is Fort Apache, the Bronx. “You need always to be on guard.” 

COWEN: I think that’s part of the appeal of the job, by the way. Go on. For many people, “it’s exciting.”

TABARROK: Yes, it is. It can be. If we had more police on the street, crime itself would be lower. Some of this fear on both sides would go away. I think it can be done, but we have to start. We’ve got to start sometime because, fundamentally, I do worry, for precisely all the things we’ve been talking about, the contagion effect, this underlying criminality, which is waiting to break free, that if we become complacent—you wrote a book on the complacent.

COWEN: Class.

TABARROK: Class, yes. If we become complacent, then crime could explode once again. We don’t have really good explanations as we’ve seen in our podcast. We don’t have really good explanations for the massive increase in crime, which we saw four times increase, five times increase in the number of murders in the space of 10 years. If that happened again, we would again be overwhelmed. We would be overwhelmed. We’re not ready for it. I worry that if we become too complacent, then we won’t be able to shut down a crime wave quick enough.

COWEN: My takeaway from all this, very consistent with that, is simply we should not take our current low-crime environment for granted. It could change quite a bit and fairly rapidly.

TABARROK: Agreed. Thanks, Tyler.

COWEN: Thank you, Alex.