Special online issue of Vital City: “Crime: Looking Back at 2024, and Ahead to 2025”

The always notable Vital City has a notable and robust new special online issue titled “Crime: Looking Back at 2024, and Ahead to 2025.”  I count 15 pieces in the issue which all look interesting.  This introductory essay provides an overview and links to all the pieces, and here are excerpts with links to a few of the pieces:

Beginning in 2022, at the end of each year, Vital City has asked some of the country’s and New York City’s most influential policymakers and researchers to comment on the most important trends in public safety and to speculate on what the future might bring. The exercise is open-ended and serves as an invitation for some of the most thoughtful thinkers in this space to simply share what’s on their minds. Commenters come from academia as well as the policy world and hold views from across the political spectrum. What each of the contributors shares is a respect for data and a desire to understand crime and improve public safety in big cities like New York….

[C]ontributors to this volume offer a number of compelling insights into what happened in 2024 and what we should look out for in 2025.

Jeff Asher starts us off with a high-level look at what happened to violence in the United States in 2024. No one follows the data more closely than Asher, so his take on the big picture should be of great import for any interested observer. Asher begins by noting that murder was down by 17% among 309 U.S. cities with available data covered in the Real-Time Crime Index. Overall, reported violence was down by around 4% and reported property crimes were down by around 9%. Alex Piquero, Chandler Hall and Nick Wilson consider variation among cities across the U.S., noting that some cities have seen violence decline more than others. What do the most successful cities have in common? As they note, these cities seem to have focused their attention on the people and places that drive the violence and have adopted multiagency, multipronged violence prevention partnerships that adopt a public health approach to violence prevention, engaging a wide range of partners alongside law enforcement….

While the available survey data and data on violence suggest a mind-warping disconnect, Charles Fain Lehman reminds us that disorderly behavior is also a major driver of New Yorkers’ level of fear and well-being. Lehman considers why the public has gotten tougher on crime as serious crimes like murder have started falling and concludes that disorder itself — including problems like disorderly behavior by homeless people, public drug use and shoplifting — may explain the perceptual gap….

Finally, in a particularly fitting contribution for a data-driven periodical like Vital City, John Roman reminds us how little we actually know about the nature of crime and violence and urges developing a more comprehensive framework to think about crime shifts over time. Social science methods are designed mostly to test the effects of interventions (e.g., Did a medical treatment reduce mortality? Did a court reform affect public safety?) and are less well designed to understand why the world looks as it does (e.g., Why did crime rise in 2020 and fall after 2021?). Roman argues we need to develop a more holistic understanding of crime at the macro level, explaining the cyclical nature of crime, accommodating different types of crimes as well as how crime varies across sectors and regions.