Crime in Massachusetts may possibly be going up, and if it is, the “swooning economy” could be an explanation, the Boston Globe reports today.

The evidence: “Police departments say they have noticed not only a startling increase in some statistics, but more unusual crimes coming across the scanner.” Alas, the story does not include any data from the Unusual Crime Index, but we can assume that a paragraph like this would have been impossible to write a few years ago: 

In Ludlow, the same bank was robbed twice in 13 months, an aberration for a small town that had not had a bank robbery in two decades. In New Bedford, detectives are dealing with dozens of complaints from people who lost of thousands of dollars in scams that promised cash prizes. In Quincy, thieves stole three snowplow blades in one weekend last December, most likely, detectives say, because they needed to replace their own blade or wanted sell the piece to other drivers.

There are about a dozen story ideas in today’s crime round-up (a surge in reported child abuse appears near the end of the piece, and poor Ludlow gets another mention as the alleged epicenter of an eBay scam), but the Globe probably doesn’t have the resources to cover them all, so instead they get bundled together as a trend piece. And it’s hard to refute logic like this:

“I’ve been a police officer for 25 years and I’ve never seen a snowplow stolen,” Quincy police Captain John Dougan said. “My best educated guess is the economy has something to do with it.”