The author(s) shown below used Federal funds provided by the U.S. Department of Justice and prepared the following final report: Document Title: Expanding the Scope of Research on Recent Crime Trends Author:

Statement of Purpose While there is a burgeoning research literature on crime trends, much of the extant research has adopted a relatively narrow approach, efforts across studies are highly variable, and the overall conclusions that can be drawn are ambiguous. In our judgment, one reason for this state of affairs is that the current data infrastructure that supports crime trends research is incomplete and scattered, yielding redundant efforts and highly inconsistent approaches. The primary purpose of this project was to enhance the data infrastructure by compiling in a centralized location the most commonly referenced datasets and measures. An ancillary objective was to illustrate the utility of the resulting data archive. We do so by considering three substantive research issues: (1) a uniform set of analyses across states, counties, and cities; (2) an assessment of the conditional effects of economic conditions on recent crime trends; and (3) an expanded analysis of the effects of key criminal justice attributes (e.g., the nature of policing, ageand crime-specific imprisonment rates) on recent crime trends that have not been considered extensively in prior research. Methods The specific samples, time frames, and measures employed vary somewhat across the three substantive issues addressed, but our general analytical strategy in addressing these issues is to construct when possible from the Crime Trends Data Archive (CTDA) produced in the project a panel database with requisite measures centered on the following time points: 1980, 1985, 1990, 1995, 2000, 2005, and 2010. This approach marshals the strength of a pooled cross-sectional design, while also avoiding the significant data imputation that is needed to support panel analyses of annual time periods for sub-national geographic units. The three sets of empirical analyses reported in the project include models of overall homicide, non-lethal violence (robbery and aggravated assault), and non-violent property crime (burglary, motor vehicle theft, and larceny). We estimate a series of twoway fixed-effects panel models of crime rates that include fixed effects that control for stable unmeasured city attributes and temporal shocks that are shared across cities. Results Our uniform empirical analysis across units of analysis revealed that minimalist specifications can yield misleading conclusions. It also revealed that age structure and divorce rates are robust predictors of crime rates, with higher crime in areas with a larger percentage of persons aged 15-29 and where divorce rates are higher. Additionally, the results reaffirm findings shown in other work on non-violent property crime by showing that incarceration rates tend to yield lower crime rates, but at a diminishing rate as incarceration reaches very high levels. Our analysis of conditional economic effects pointed to a tendency of “objective criminal justice risk” to lessen the criminogenic consequences of elevated unemployment rates and depressed wages. Another intriguing pattern that emerged is that the estimated adverse effects of unemployment and wages on non-lethal crime (both violent and property) are weaker in the face of elevated levels of income maintenance payments (i.e., SSI, Snap, family assistance). Finally, our expanded analysis of criminal justice factors showed that, at least for non-lethal violence and non-violent property crime, arrest certainty for these crimes is a robust predictor of lower crime rates. We also found that non-violent 1 This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice. property crime rates are significantly lower in counties with higher imprisonment rates and in counties situated within states that have higher imprisonment rates. Conclusions The key product of the grant – the CTDA -should prove valuable to those involved in or considering the study of contemporary American crime trends. We recommend that the NACJD use the CTDA as the basis of establishing a permanent, distinct archive on crime trends research. 2 This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.