Since I didn’t get in too much hot water for last week’s graph, I may as well take the trouble to point out that those four California cities are actually part of a much wider national trend against violence and victimization in general, which was graphically illustrated by Steven Pinker in The Better Angels of Our Nature, in chapter 7:
Source: Uniform Crime Reports and National Crime Victimization Survey; Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2009.
Incidentally, I like how he based-lined both data sets at 100% in 1973, which makes it easier to see whether the rates are correlated. After the graph, Pinker notes that while theories abound as to the decline of violence in general, “criminologists have not jumped into the breach” in an attempt to give an explanation for the decline in rape in particular, “There is no Broken Windows theory, no Freakonomics theory, that has tried to explain the three-decade plunge.”
Your thoughts?
