The Indirect Consequences of Crime

Efforts to measure the costs of crime generally focus on direct effects. They try to place a monetary value on the loss to victims and tally the cost to governments of dealing with crime. Yet looking only to direct effects and ignoring indirect effects is a major source of error in public policy. The indirect effects of crime are large and important. Brian Patrick Eha has a two-part essay in the City Journal titled The Element of Crime, exploring these issues. Part one is here. His focus is on New York, the place he knows best, but the theme is universal.

To live in New York today is to experience, on a regular basis, visibly and abrasively, the element of crime. By this, I mean more than run-ins with the “criminal element,” that is, serious offenders, though such encounters are more frequent. I mean not only, for instance, the 25 times that someone was pushed onto subway tracks in 2022—four more times than in 2021—but also the countless small infractions, spit in the eye of the body politic, the casual disrespect for law and common decency: the picnic table covered in food waste and Kool-Aid pouches when a trash can is two feet away; the pharmacy with locked cabinets for such valuables as fruit juice and deodorant; the requirement, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s recent Van Gogh exhibit, to empty your water bottle before entering the gallery, for fear that some vandal might smuggle in a substance with which to desecrate the art, as has happened at more than a dozen museums over the past year.  I mean, in short, all the demoralizing effects of which pervasive crime is the cause, the impact that lawlessness and an inescapable awareness of it—to say nothing of official resignation or indifference—has on society and the psyche.

The pervasive, corroding effect of a large number of relatively minor offenses is not a new revelation. George Kelling and James Q. Wilson described it long ago in their famous 1982 Broken Windows article. (See Kelling’s refutation of some of the bogus claims against it here.) But Eha describes the effect in compelling and contemporary terms.

Major crime, also, has an indirect effect on people beyond the immediate victims, as the justified fear of it alters the way people live their lives. It also creates a division in society, as people with the means to easily avoid most of the danger of crime often become advocates for policies that endanger those who do not. Eha describes the 2012 murder of Hwangbum Yang, 26, while walking home just two blocks from the family house. The robber killed him just to steal his iPhone. Eha then concludes part one with this:

The murder shattered my illusion of safety. The corner where Yang died was part of the route that I commonly took on my own walks home. In the weeks after the killing, I still stayed out late at night; I still loved the city, but from then on, I went home a different way, and it occurred to me then, as it has many times since, that the overlap in the Venn diagram of people who advance policies that make urban areas less safe and of people who must walk home late at night through wet and empty streets is probably close to nil. There is no world in which the well-meaning bien pensants in their gated communities, their university-affiliated housing, their sheltered and homogenous enclaves are exposed to the full consequences of what they propose—no scenario in which they are made to step, taking their lives in their hands, into the domain of violent crime. The elite of every city carry in their heads a mental map of no-go zones, so ingrained as to be, for many, unconscious: they avoid the block parties and sidewalk barbecues, summering elsewhere, outside the city limits; they decline to ride public transit, often shunning it altogether after midnight, on weekends, especially in the warmer months. They commute to their offices or investment properties or pied-à-terres, imposing on themselves a kind of curfew, or if not a curfew, relying on a car service to take them safely home. From their quiet homes, they deplore the “gentrification” of noise-polluted ghettos. From the height of privilege, they lament the correlation between poverty and criminality, without ever asking whether the two conditions, rather than having a causal relationship, might share a common root.

I look forward to Eha’s further exploration of the “common root” in part two. I have long believed that this is a fundamental flaw in the “root cause” claims that we have heard so often for so long.