Cheaper drugs, and thus less crime: the crime drop's ...

Dialect Anthropol (2016) 40:385–393 DOI 10.1007/s10624-016-9442-5

Cheaper drugs, and thus less crime: the crime drop’s ‘‘Philosopher’s Stone’’? Travis Wendel1 Jay Hamilton2

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Geert Dhondt2 • Ric Curtis3

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Published online: 18 November 2016 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016

The criminal produces not only crimes but also criminal law, and with this also the professor who gives lectures on criminal law and in addition to this the inevitable compendium in which this same professor throws his lectures on the general market as ‘‘commodities’’. This brings with it augmentation of national wealth, quite apart from the personal enjoyment which…the manuscript of the compendium brings to its originator himself. Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value [page 387] The crime drop in New York City, the USA, across Western societies and beyond, has produced a whole industry of scholars attempting to explain this crime drop, while also defending the turf they build their careers on, or perhaps their own political convictions. Our article ‘‘More Drugs, Less Crime’’ (Wendel et al. 2016), and the other articles in this themed issue of Dialectical Anthropology, are a contribution to this growing industry of mostly implausible explanations. This article provides our comments on the critiques, and compliments, of the various authors commenting on our original article. The commentators are mostly very positive about our main point, a ‘‘new hypothesis of the crime decline’’ (Green 2016). Our main argument is that it is possible that crime dropped in New York City, the USA, and internationally, because crime rates might be influenced by the concurrent drop in drug prices.

& Travis Wendel [email protected] 1

Vermont CARES, Burlington, VT, USA

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Department of Economics, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, New York, USA

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Department of Anthropology, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, New York, USA

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In addition to the compliments, there are also serious critiques of the article, which we will address below. After reviewing our main argument, we will first discuss the common critique that we focus on New York, and not on the USA or internationally (Greenberg 2016; Green 2016). Second, we will comment on issues with data and methodology (Michalowski 2016; Green 2016). Lastly, we will discuss the critique that our argument is under-theorized, and that we overstate our argument of the crime drop.

Cheaper drugs, thus less crime Drug markets can be modeled as competitive markets with a downward inelastic demand curve, and an upward sloping supply curve. The demand curve is a representation of the quantity of a particular commodity demanded at a particular price. The supply curve represents the quantity supplied at a particular imaginary price. If there is excess supply, suppliers will lower prices to try to attract more customers. Impacts on supply include the costs of raw materials and other market inputs, and the number of potential producers, as well as transportation/smuggling costs. The demand curve is based on the tastes and preferences of consumers. This also depends on consumers’ incomes, their distribution, and the number of potential buyers. In the case of illegal drug use, we can assume that the slope of the demand curve is more inelastic than for many goods, as they may produce physical or psychological dependence, and consumers who consume, e.g., heroin would still need to ‘‘get straight,’’ regardless of the price of heroin (Bowles et al. 2005; Marcus et al. 2016; Burrus et al. 2007; Kilmer and Hoorens 2010). If there were a simultaneous decrease in demand for illegal drugs, and an increase in the supply of illegal drugs, we would expect that there would be a decrease in drug prices. We use Curtis and Wendel’s decades of unpublished and published ethnographic research to provide evidence of a sustained decrease in demand in illegal drugs in New York City. We rely on secondary sources to provide evidence for an increase in the supply of illegal drugs: the Drug Enforcement Agency’s STRIDE data to show a decrease in the price of drugs, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s New York City UCR data (collected by the New York Police Department) to show the concurrent drop in crime. Law enforcement efforts in the ‘‘War On Drugs’’ focus on such things as interdiction, crop eradication, and trafficking prevention to decrease the supply of drugs. Simultaneously, governments pursue policies in consumption prevention, drug education, and treatment, to reduce demand. A reduction in demand, and a reduction in supply through government policies, would actually increase the price of drugs. While these government drug war policies would, if effective, increase drug prices, in actuality, prices dropped drastically across the Western world. For the next step of our argument, we need to look at the impact of a change in drug prices on crime rates. Theoretically, successful law enforcement would increase drug prices. How would this increase in price impact crime rates? First, one would think that an increase in prices would attract more entrepreneurs to get

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into the business of supplying drugs. This might lead to increased violence or turf wars as drug dealers to fight over the increased revenues. A decrease in prices should do the opposite, as revenues and profits disappear, turf wars become less worthwhile, and violence would decrease. If drug users would want their supplies regardless of the price, then if the price of, e.g., heroin increases, users would need more money to finance use, leading to more crime to finance the increased costs. If the price of illegal drugs drops, crime related to finance use should conversely decrease. These and other relationships between drug prices and crime are discussed in our original article, using Goldstein’s framework. After we establish a plausible explanation of why a drop in heroin and cocaine prices could decrease crime rates, we do econometric analysis to support our argument with the limited empirical evidence available, and further support this argument with ethnographic material drawn from decades of fieldwork. We use a common econometric technique for analysis time-series data where we test for Granger causality. The results show that the drop of illegal drug prices Granger-causes the drop in crime rates. This evidence supports our theoretical argument that the crime drop can be explained by a drop in the price of illegal drugs.

The international crime drop Crime did not just drop in New York City, or the USA, but across the Western world. Thus, some argue that we should not be talking about ‘‘the city that became safe’’ (Zimring 2012), or even ‘‘the great American crime decline’’ (Zimring 2007), but instead about the international crime drop. Any explanation of the crime drop in New York, or the USA, should also have explanatory power internationally (Farrell et al. 2014; Tonry 2014; Greenberg 2014, 2016). Tonry (2014) makes a powerful argument that crime rates move together in ‘‘English-speaking countries and western Europe’’ (Tonry 2014, 2). Tonry argues that many social indicators move together in these areas of the world from income inequality and female labor force participation rates to life expectancy and marriage rates (Tonry 2014, 2–3). What government policy to address crime rates is ‘‘besides the point in terms of crime rates and patterns,’’ Tonry argues. Government policies from mass incarceration and policing strategy, to legalization of abortion, and reductions in lead paint are distinctly American trends, and it is ‘‘parochial’’ to explain the crime drop in Vancouver, Berlin, Stockholm, Madrid, Rome, and Paris in distinctly American developments (Tonry 2014). Thus, our argument that cheaper drugs influenced the crime drop needs to hold not just for New York City, the site of our study, but needs to hold across the USA, Canada, and European countries. First, crime declined across the USA, Canada, and other western European nations (Tonry 2014; Farrell et al. 2014). The crime drop is very pronounced in New York City, but crime drops internationally, and follows a similar pattern across countries. Drug prices drop not just in NYC, but also in Canada, and across the European Union (Kilmer and Hoorens 2010; UNODC 2015; EMCDDA 2016). While some of our critics assail us for failing to discuss the international crime drop, this was never our intention. The scope of our argument

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was not one we chose: This paper originated as an invited paper for a conference devoted to explaining the crime drop in New York City (see Justice Quarterly 31:1 (2014) for all the other papers presented at that conference1).

Data and methodological issues Our critics have focused on both problems with the data we use, as well as methodological issues. Michalowski (2016) and Green (2016) critique us for a variety of data and methodological issues, from acknowledging the limitations of the data, to not providing context, to cooking the books. Michalowski (2016) and Green (2016) point out that there are serious limitations in the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report. This is absolutely true, and we should have acknowledged these limitations. In 2009 and 2010, Dhondt visited police departments in New Jersey to get data from them for an NIJ funded project (Clear et al. 2014). Their data collection and knowledge were very limited. In Camden, police didn’t do much data collection, while in Trenton, one police sergeant told us that they do not have any data other than UCR Part I data, because offenses that are not Part I offenses are not really crimes. Thus, since the UCR is compiled from voluntary reporting from local police departments, it is hard to place great faith in it. However, we use only data provided to the FBI by the New York Police Department, generally considered one of the best nationally in data collection, having pioneered the CompStat crime analysis/response strategy that so many credit with having caused the New York City crime decline. Further, there is no plausible alternative to using UCR data. The most common alternative is the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), but victim interviews by definition can provide no data on homicide (since there are no living victims), and NCVS does not report disaggregated data by city, and thus, we were not able to use this alternative. In retrospect, it is surprising that none of the reviewers questioned the source or use of the price data, which is used by researchers far less frequently than FBI Index Crimes, and was collected by the DEA. This price data can be supplemented and expanded in future research by other price data, and price series using forensic data (Kilmer and Hoorens 2010). Michalowski (2016) also cautions us of slipping down the methodological lexical rabbit hole of Granger causality. Granger causality, he says, is not causality causality, and we may overstate our evidence and claims. We may slip down this 1

Several commentators correctly note that irony is among the major themes of our paper that attributes good outcomes to the backlash from failed ‘‘War On Drugs’’ strategies. Our original conference paper that led to this current publication was intended largely as a prank. First, our argument is very much intended to upset the applecart of American criminology, so much of which is devoted simultaneously to adulation of law enforcement, and to ignoring the subjectivity of those who violate laws. Second, research intended to explore our hypothesis is unlikely to be funded by the two largest US funders of drugs/crime research. The National Institute on Drug Abuse, by statute, may only fund research which seeks to show the harms of currently illicit substances. The National Institute of Justice seldom funds research on the positive effects of law enforcement failure. The fact that our argument also appears to be correct provides additional surplus value.

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hole in trying to be provocative. Our argument about the connections between drug prices and crime rates needs considerable further research. Similarly, Michalowski (2016) says there is a lack of context. This is also a reasonable criticism. The ethnographic research from Wendel and Curtis that we present spans decades, and draws on both published and previously unpublished work, and is admittedly thin on ethnographic context. We can only plead that we are attempting a large-scale synthesis that fundamentally seeks to reorient how we think about crime and criminals. Green (2016) also emphasizes data and methodological problems with our article, but goes much further in his critique by insinuating that we cooked the books. First, Green argues that we use bad quality crime measures from the UCR. Green argues that we should have used Zimring’s (2007) approach by using only auto theft, homicide, and robbery. We should, he says, also have supplemented this data with using self-reports or victimization data. That we did not do this makes our analysis ‘‘especially conspicuous,’’ since we do not even acknowledge the problems with the UCR data. These mistakes make our analysis not just suspect but even ‘‘disingenuous’’ (Green 2016). Based on Green’s comments, we ran a series of new VAR regressions on the price of heroin, cocaine, and crack on robbery and motor vehicle theft. We ran the exact same VAR regressions as in the original paper. We are sorry to report that heroin prices Granger-cause both motor vehicle theft and robbery. Cocaine prices also Granger-cause both motor vehicle theft and robbery. Crack prices also Grangercause both motor vehicle theft and robbery. The reason that we originally did not use motor vehicle theft is twofold. Auto theft may have declined over the period in question mostly because of technological ‘‘target-hardening’’ measures. In a city such as New York, where only 44% of households owned a car in 2000 (Kazis 2011), auto theft may also be less important as a crime indicator than elsewhere. Originally, we just picked larceny over robbery, as we didn’t want to use both. In the new VAR regressions, the price of heroin predicts both the rates of motor vehicle theft and robbery. What this means knowing the past price of heroin predicts future heroin prices as well as future auto theft rates and rates of robbery. Although motor vehicle theft rates cannot pass the 95% confidence interval for future motor vehicle theft rates, robbery results are statistically significant at the 5% level. For both the Dickey–Fuller test for a unit root was negative. Second-order lags are uniformly insignificant throughout the results. The Granger causality Wald for the price of heroin on motor vehicle theft is 0.054 and on the price of heroin is 0.96. The Granger causality Wald for the price of heroin on robbery rates is 0.21 and on the price of heroin is 0.86. Similarly, the Granger causality Wald for cocaine on motor vehicle theft is 0.071 and on the price of cocaine is 0.205. For the results of cocaine on robbery, the Granger causality Wald is 1.36 and for the cocaine on motor vehicle theft it is 0.089. For crack cocaine prices, the Granger causality Wald on motor vehicle theft is 0.025 and on the price of cocaine it is 0.57. The crack cocaine price on rates of robbery is 0.99, while the price of crack cocaine is 0.94. The results of are even better for our argument than the originally used crime categories. While the motor vehicle theft results were not statistically significant, the rates for robbery

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results were statistically significant. We can thank Green for his comments to help us provide more and stronger evidence in support of our argument. Green seems skeptical about our passing mention of 1970s–1980 s marijuana eradication efforts involving paraquat because it is unsourced. Marijuana eradication efforts through spraying paraquat in the late 1970s and early 1980s did in fact happen; we thought this was common knowledge. The Mexican government started spraying marijuana crops in 1975 with US support and funding (Press 1981; Smith 1979; Boe 1985, Mullen 1983, Landrigan et al. 1983, CDC 1979). Green also argues that we ignore a very inconvenient fact, namely that two US Bureau of Justice Statistics factsheets show that only 17% of crimes are ‘‘drug related.’’2 Green writes that this ‘‘would leave at least 80% of crimes beyond the reach of the cheaper-drug mechanism’’ (Green 2016). This is clearly mistaken for several reasons. Based on prisoner self-reports of state inmates, about 60% use drugs regularly, and about 40% were high at the time of their arrest (Dhondt 2012). One can also make a plausible argument that through drug use, criminal skills are learned, and criminal social networks developed. This 17% of ‘‘drug-related’’ crime is only one small, and particularly direct, form of crime related to drugs. Green’s arguments and suggestions as to our ‘‘disingenuous’’ analysis seem intended as a buildup to his own data-free, and deeply implausible, claim as to the causes of the crime drop: Trends in consumption of media luxury goods caused the drop in crime among the poor and marginalized. Green references an unpublished paper for further evidence to support his argument, but here are also some ‘‘inconvenient facts.’’ Green develops a novel claim wherein increased media consumption, and consumption of new forms of media, among youth leads to a drop in crime. Increased access to violent and sexual media actually reduced crime, instead of doing the opposite, as was claimed in a 1980s crusade against violent and sexual media (Gore 1987). There is indeed a whole parallel industry to the ‘‘crime drop explanation’’ industry we mention devoted to explaining consumption of media as criminogenic. If Green is correct that crime declined because youth staying at home and playing video games, watching cable TV, and surfing the Internet replaced youth going out and committing street crimes, these new media sources must at least have been available to them. Sadly, the timing of Green’s claim makes no sense, and reflects a lack of knowledge of New York City conditions during the period in question, particularly in the poor communities most affected by crime. The new media Green references were not widely available to youth in poor and minority New York communities until well after the period we discuss. Video gaming equipment was expensive and unaffordable to non-affluent New York youth during the period in question. Cable TV was not available outside Manhattan until after 1987 (Lambert 1987; Barron 1990). As late as 1994, cable TV remained mostly unavailable outside Manhattan (Barron 1994). Similarly, there is the notorious ‘‘digital divide’’ in access to the Internet by minorities, where even in 2000, fewer than 40% of nonwhites in the US 2

We note that those who accuse others of being ‘‘careless,’’ ‘‘slack,’’ and ‘‘negligent’’ ought to be careful themselves. It is impressive indeed that Green’s cited 1994 and 2000 BJS sources are able to reveal what portion of crime was ‘‘drug related’’ in 2002 and 2004 (Green 2016, Table 1).

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had computers at home (Fairlie 2004). It is hard to argue that video games, cable TV, and Internet surfing lowered crime in the New York City, when young people did not have access to video games, cable TV, and the Internet. Green’s theory seems implausible on a cursory look; he will have to develop his theory, and provide some actual empirical evidence, to order to convince skeptics.

Theory, certainty, and a research agenda ‘‘More Drugs, Less Crime,’’ and this themed section of Dialectical Anthropology, represent an attempt to start a conversation around a different explanation of the crime drop, namely that the drop in drug prices can possibly explain the drop in crime, and also seeks to reorient how we think about crime and criminal toward acknowledging the agency of those commit (and do not commit) criminal offenses. At times, we are polemic, and we acknowledge that our argument needs to develop into a larger research agenda. The commentators point in different directions as to how to develop the evidence needed to substantiate our argument. Our critics correctly argue that we overstate our argument with unwarranted certainty. Our argument is also, they say, under-theorized. We believe this is also correct. This leads us to the need to develop a research agenda around this theory of the crime drop. A new research agenda would need to flesh out this cheaper drug, less crime argument. Michalowski (2016) points us into one direction, but we would need to develop theory in more than one direction. We would also need to theorize this argument in the context of the larger political economy. A price theory framework could also be developed of this argument. A new research agenda also needs to have a larger empirical focus and create data sets and economic analysis where this cheaper drug, less crime hypothesis is tested across the USA, and across the Western world. More thought needs to be put into both the crime data and the price data to make the analyses more rigorous. We would also need to explain the different in size of the crime drop across different geographical spaces.3 We expect to work to develop this argument further, and we hope other scholars will do so as well. Future studies will help determine the validity of the ‘‘More Drugs, Less Crime’’ argument. We would like to thank all the commentators for their thoughtful contributions.

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Greenberg points to this in his article. He asked us to send our data sets and our Stata code, which we did. He provided additional analysis and concludes that the new results are consistent with our ‘‘suggestion that changes in New York’s drug markets have been important determinants of changes in its crime rates’’ (Greenberg 2016), but adds a cautionary message that bivariate relationships can be misleading. Thus, Greenberg calls for further research ‘‘for other offenses, other cities, and other variables’’ (Greenberg 2016).

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