One of the lead stories in the news today is the foiled attempt of five high school students to execute a Columbine-style massacre at their school in Riverton, Kansas. Congratulations to the authorities on averting a potential disaster.
As we go deeper into this story, I have little doubt that we will be confronted with claims of epidemic youth violence. In light of that, I thought I would offer some data about youth violence. What do the trends show?
Unfortunately, the most recent data for youth violent deaths is from 2002. Still, we see a trend from 1993-2002.
Notice the sharp declines from a little more than a decade ago in homicides both at and away from school. Suicides have declined by a significant but lesser degree. There is reason to believe that if the data were available, we would see the violent deaths were even higher than in ’93, extending back to about 1980. We are at or near a generation-long low in violent deaths for children.
Now look at the nonfatal violent crime and theft levels among school-age children.
Again we see dramatic declines over the last decade until about 2000, when the rates seem to have leveled off. There is good reason to believe that while rates were slightly lower in the late 1980s than in 1993, the period around 1980 was likely the peak of the crime rate. Again, we are at a generational low.
For more insight, we can look at the National Crime Victimization Surveys, widely believed to be the best indicator of actual crime.
This graph shows all crime, not just youth crime. Notice the thirty-five-year high for property crime was in the mid-1970s, and the peak for violent crime was in 1981 (although a nearly equal rate was achieved in 1994 and was directly related to the crack-cocaine epidemic.) Property crime is only one-third what it was thirty years ago, and violent crime is only a little more than half the high of about twenty-five years ago.
As troubling as the Riverton incident is, I think it is important to understand it in light of the broader picture. There is no massive wave of school violence and crime.
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