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Starting in the mid-1990s, major American cities began a radical transformation. Years of high violent crime rates, thefts, robberies, and inner-city decay suddenly started to turn around. Crime rates didn't just hold steadily, and they began falling faster than they went up.(1)____ That trend appeared in practically every post-industrial American city, simultaneously.(2)____
"The drop of come in the 1990s effected all geographic areas and demographic groups," Steven D. Levitt wrote in his landmark paper on the subject, Understanding Why Crime Fell in the 199Ds, and elucidated further in a best-selling book Freakonomics.(3)____(4)____ "It was unanticipated that it was widely dismissed as temporary or illusory long after it had begun.(5)____" He went on to tie the drop to the legalization of abortion 20 years much earlier, dismissing police tactics as a cause but they failed to explain the universality and unexpectedness of the change.(6)____(7)____ Alfred Blumstein's The Crime Drop in America pinned the cause of crime solely on the crack epidemic but gave the credit for its appearance to those self-same policing strategies.(8)____
Plenty of other theories have been offered to account for the double-digit decrease in violence, from the advent of "broken windows" policies, three strikes laws, changing demographics, gun control laws, and the increasing prevalence of cellphones or an upturn in the economy and cultural shifts in American society. Some of these theories have disproven outright while othersrequire a healthy dose of assumption to turn correlation into causation.
