Homicides were down statewide in Massachusetts last year by 39 percent over 2011’s figures, a steep decline that law enforcement officials are crediting to a focused State Police effort in violence-prone communities.
In New York, Mayor Michael Bloomberg declared that a slight uptick in crime could be explained entirely by the increased ubiquity — and irresistible allure to would-be robbers — of iPhones. The city’s murder count, meanwhile, was lowest since comparable recording-keeping began in 1963. On the other hand, yesterday’s Times brought that news that the continued murder decline would come as news to residents of a tough area of East Harlem, where violent crime has been spiking.
Last year, CommonWealth featured this Conversation interview with David Kennedy, a criminal justice researcher who has pioneered the use of innovative policing strategies credited with driving down gun violence in cities that have adopted them, including Boston, in the mid and late 1990s. Freakonomics authors Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner famously put forward the theory that the legalization of abortion in the early 1970s explained a crime drop that began roughly two decades later, as fewer young people were coming of age from homes ill-equipped to care for children. Others have pointed to swings in the economic cycle or to the ebb and flow of crack cocaine in big cities.
But what if the crime decreases attributable to things novel policing techniques and other strategies are just noise around the margins of a much bigger, unseen, force that is responsible for much of the steep drop in violence crime nationwide that has occurred over the last several decades? That’s the intriguing theory put forth by Kevin Drum in the new issue of Mother Jones. The big factor, Drum writes, is lead. Not lead exposure from paint, which gets a lot of attention as a cause of cognitive impairment in urban-dwelling kids, but from gasoline, which was pumped full of the toxin from the 1920s until it was banned in 1996.
Drum digs through the evidence and provides a pretty compelling story in support of the lead-crime hypothesis. Violent crime rates rose — with a lag time of just over 20 years — directly with the rise of leaded gasoline and fell in the same fashion as automakers phased in vehicles run on unleaded gas. Among the bits of intriguing evidence he gathers up: For a long time, murder rates were higher in big cities than in small ones and towns. While many attributed this various social pathologies of urban life and poverty, this also coincided with the peak periods of leaded gasoline use, and big cities have much more concentrated presence of cars and hence higher atmospheric lead levels. As lead levels in gas decreased, so did the difference in murder rates between big cities and smaller communities, such that murder rates are actually similar today in cities of all sizes, writes Drum.
What does all of this mean going forward? While lead is no longer spewed out of car tailpipes, it is all around us, settled into soil, where it continues to get kicked up, carried on shoes, and finds its way into the human bloodstream. Using various models, Drum projects the cost of massive lead abatement efforts to get lead out of soil in the hardest-hit communities and replacement of windows that still carry lead paint. He pegs it roughly at $20 billion per year for 20 years, but says the cumulative benefits on economic returns from higher cognitive functioning and decreases in all the costs associated with crime could total as much as $200 billion per year, or a 10-to-1 return on our lead-abatement investment. “Those are returns that Wall Street hedge funds can only dream of,” he writes.
Drum writes that one researcher who done a lot of work on the lead-crime hypothesis says she had a hard time getting law enforcement officials interested in the theory when she at a conference of police chiefs. “They want to think that what they do on a daily basis matters. And it does,” she told Drum.
But, as Drum writes, the bigger point is “it may not matter as much as they think.”
–MICHAEL JONAS
Municipal Matters
Businesses and residents with waterfront property in Somerset have seen their tax bills skyrocket by thousands of dollars after selectmen voted to raise commercial property taxes by 24 percent and residential by 17 percent.
Former state Rep. Jose Santiago of Lawrence, recently added to the city’s payroll, is arrested for violating a protective restraining order obtained by his ex-girlfriend, the Eagle-Tribune reports. Lantigua’s ongoing refusal to file state campaign finance paperwork, or pay his campaign finance fines, would exclude him from the ballot if he were running for a state-level seat, but there’s no similar enforcement mechanism for local candidates.
National Politics/Washington
President Obama plans to nominate former Nebraska senator Chuck Hagel for defense secretary and John Brennan, his counter-terrorism advisor, as CIA director. Weekly Standard editor and conservative bellwether William Kristol says the cacophonous opposition to Hagel is dwarfed by the silence of support for his nomination.
House Speaker John Boehner tells the Wall Street Journal’s Stephen Moore that President Obama is convinced the nation doesn’t have a spending problem. He also explains his dropping of the F-bombs.
In U.S. News & World Report, Susan Milligan, who’s covered Washington for some time, says it’s no big f—— deal when pols curse each other out.
The New York Times weighs in on the complicated task Rep. Paul Ryan faces — doing his job while staying popular with the right. Meanwhile, New York magazine argues that Ryan’s Young Gun counterpart, Eric Cantor, isn’t acting brashly enough.
New York profiles Eric Schneiderman, New York’s activist attorney general.
Elections
Support continues to pile up for Barney Frank for interim Senator. Kimberly Atkins goes further, urging Frank to run for Senate. The National Review puts together a short video montage of what they call Frank’s “greatest hits.” Keller@Large devotes his entire Sunday half-hour to who will run for the seat and includes a number of interviews with members of the state’s congressional delegation who are pondering a run. Just what would an interim-Sen. Frank be pushing for in the tax and spending debate now looming? The New Republic’s Alec MacGillis goes right to the voluble source.
Last year’s election in Massachusetts was a boon for consultants, particularly out-of-state advisors, the BU Statehouse Program reports (via Lowell Sun).
Republicans, with an eye on 2016, woo Jeb Bush.
Business/Economy
A project labor agreement signed as part of the $50 million development of the South Terminal in New Bedford has sparked a fight by those non-union contractors iced out by the agreement.
The Federal Reserve is closing in on a $10 billion foreclosure abuse settlement with upwards of a dozen banks.
Bank of America will pay Fannie Mae $3.6 billion to make good on soured mortgages that the bank’s Countrywide Financial unit sold to the government mortgage giant.
It’s not your father’s Boston Financial District, the Globe reports.
Education
Michelle Rhee flunks twelve states.
Gregory Groover won’t seek re-election as chairman of the Boston School Committee, a post that is expected to go fellow committee member Michael O’Neill, a vice president at SBLI life insurance.
Health Care
Exercise is good for teenage minds, NPR reports (via WBUR).
Transportation
The Berkshire Eagle says that the region should get its fair share of any new transportation revenues.
Energy/Environment
A fight over beach-goers by two sets of Dennis property owners highlights the problems of ocean access on the Cape.
New Bedford officials expect to receive approval for a massive solar farm at the city’s Water Department that will run the entire department and drastically reduce the $600,000 annual electric bill.
The state has dropped its bald eagle count, held every January for the past 30 years, because the population of the formerly endangered species has swelled significantly.
Criminal Justice
Citing budget constraints, the head of the State Police announced that he’s disbanding a drug diversion unit and auto theft strike force.
A man watching television with his fiance in a Brockton apartment was struck in the head by a bullet fired from the apartment above.
Media
The MetroWest Daily News examines media coverage of the drug lab tampering case.
The Atlantic takes up the future of journalism as a capitalist venture, in light of Andrew Sullivan’s embrace of a paywall, and BuzzFeed’s venture capital fundraising.
The Herald fills prime space on Page 3 and at the top of its home page with OMG, an advice column.
