@McGentrix,
McGentrix wrote:
You keep using these statistics as something they are not.
Maybe this has something more to do with the decrease in crime during that time period...
Ah... ya beat me to it...No matter, thanks.
And before anybody gives credit to Bill Clinton for signing the crime bill...
"Effect on the Crime Rate
Crime did drop in the years after the bill passed, as Clinton said, but he gives too much credit to the crime bill for that. Experts who have studied the impact of the law say forces independent of the law were mostly responsible for the crime drop.
A Government Accountability Office report in 2005 estimated that the 1994 crime bill resulted in 88,000 additional police officers between 1994 and 2001, and that the influx of new police officers resulted in “modest” drop in crime.
The GAO concluded that between 1993 and 2000 the Community Oriented Policing Services(COPS) funds “contributed to a 1.3 percent decline in the overall crime rate and a 2.5 percent decline in the violent crime rate from the 1993 levels.” Still, the GAO concluded, “Factors other than COPS funds accounted for the majority of the decline in crime during this period.”
What were those other factors? Increased employment, better policing methods, an aging of the population, growth in income and inflation, to name a few.
“He (Clinton) may be able to claim some credit, but the jury is very much still out on this,” John Worrall, a professor of criminology at the University of Texas at Dallas, told us via email. “Criminologists and economists are in no agreement as to the causes of the crime declines we’ve seen. Could be economic, demographic, a civilizing effect, possibly because of abortion or lead paint, tougher sentences, etc., etc. A dozen or more explanations have been offered and no one agrees.”
Worrall co-authored research published in the journal Criminology in 2007 that concluded, “COPS spending had little to no effect on crime.” But he cautioned, “Ours is one voice in a crowd. Some have found no effect. I am comfortable saying modest effect. It could not have hurt to strengthen the police presence.”
“Crime did go down through the 1990s, but nobody has shown that any of the 1994 or 1996 federal legislation was a significant cause,” Frank Zimring, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who is an expert in crime trends, told us via email."