The recent economic crisis seems to have kicked off a rash of mass murders. But does unemployment presage crime? Yes and no:
In a 2002 study, Eric Gould, Bruce Weinberg and Mr. Mustard sliced up nearly two decades of wage, unemployment and crime data, using regression analyses to probe whether economic factors were causing changes in crime rates. The relationships were strong for crimes like burglary and larceny. Violent crimes were harder to pin down.“You kind of see it for murder, and you kind of don’t see it for murder,” says Mr. Weinberg, of Ohio State University. He surmises that murders show a weak effect because some — drug murders, mostly — are economically motivated as gangs kill to expand their turf.
In a forthcoming paper, Naci Mocan at Louisiana State University studied state-level unemployment and crime data, as well as the histories of a cohort of 27,000 people born in Philadelphia in 1958. For both sets of data, property crimes showed a link to unemployment, while murder and rape had little connection, if any.
It’s not just the U.S. A study a decade ago in New Zealand found a significant link between “dishonesty” offenses — a category including theft, burglary and fraud — and unemployment, but no parallel link with violent crimes like murder, though rape did show an association.
But what about mass murders? Mr. Levin, the Northeastern University criminologist, says mass murderers fit a different profile than single-victim killers and thus can’t easily be compared. “The data, the evidence about violent crime in general, doesn’t seem to apply to mass killings,” he says. Mass murderers, he adds, are generally a peculiar sort: more likely than single-victim killers to be socially isolated, for instance, and with greater access to guns.