Heat’s On The Street During Election Years
Here’s a way to take a bite out of crime in America’s big cities: Hold an election.
It’s true, says Harvard economist Steven Levitt. There’s less crime in big cities during and immediately after mayoral and gubernatorial election years than in non-election years.
Granted, some political campaigns probably are ghastly enough to send killers, rapists and thugs scurrying out of town. But that’s not the real explanation why crime seems to take a holiday around election days.
Levitt discovered that mayors and governors systematically boost the number of police officers during election years in an apparent attempt to appear “tough on crime,” and it’s the presence of more cops on the beat that keeps the crooks in relative check.
Overall, he found that the number of sworn officers increased by 2.6 percent in cities of 250,000 or more in gubernatorial election years and by 2.2 percent in mayoral election years - but only went up, on average, four-tenths of one percentage point in non-election years.
His work is based on an exhaustive analysis of crime and police staffing data collected from the county’s 59 largest cities whose mayor is selected by direct election.
More cops mean less crime, an intuitive finding that nonetheless has been remarkably difficult for social scientists to document. Levitt found that a 1 percent increase in the number of sworn officers is associated with a 1 percent decline in violent crime. Put another way, his numbers-crunching suggests that violent crime drops “on the order of about 4 to 5 violent crimes per officer added, and there’s an equivalent reduction in the number of property crimes.”
Cynics may suggest that his research offers strong evidence that mayors and governors may be playing election year politics with crime and the cop shop budget.
“That’s not an unreasonable thought,” Levitt laughs.
They write the songs
Women who write hit songs are truly twisted sisters, suggests a new study of the personal lives of women who penned gold-record tunes over the past three decades.
Psychologist M.L. Corbin Sicoli of Cabrini College collected and analyzed biographical data on all 45 women who wrote at least two Top 50 songs between 1960 and 1990, as certified by Billboard or Rolling Stone magazine.
According to Sicoli’s study, published in the latest Creativity Research Journal, life for these women was anything but a song:
48 percent had lost a parent as a child, either through death, divorce or abandonment.
64 percent experienced “problems in establishing and maintaining intimate relationships with men, often resulting in divorce.”
68 percent experienced “mental disorders - most likely to be a form of substance abuse or anxiety/ depression.”
72 percent left home before they were 19 years old.
78 percent didn’t graduate from college, “often dropping out of high school or college.”
Of course, many men who write hit songs won’t ever be poster boys for probity, family values or good mental health. But other researchers note that creative women may have it harder than their similarly gifted male counterparts, often experiencing far greater “peer estrangement” as teens and having a more difficult time forming close friendships as adults.
xxxx HEART LIKE A WELT Female writers of Top 50 songs tend to know their heartaches from personal experience. Among 45 who had two such songs between 1960 and 1990: As child, lost parent by death, divorce, abandonment 48% Serious problems in relationships with men 64% Education cut short of college 78% From a study by psychologist M.L. Corbin Sicoli.