The other DrC and I have discussed this and believe there are a couple of causes. Her favorite cause is the city council’s desire to have liberal Chico emulate the crime-friendly policies of San Francisco. The result is a sharp rise in homelessness and its attendant crime.
The council’s members feel embattled because their little blue university town is embedded in a thoroughly red conservative rural district that hasn’t sent a Democrat to Congress for 30 years. So they overdo it more than a little.
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I suspect something different. I noticed that many cities on the list could be described as “university towns.” In addition to Chico, examples include San Angelo, TX, Binghamton, NY, Cedar Falls, IA, Fort Wayne, IN, Des Moines, IA, Albuquerque, NM, Harrisonburg, VA, Logan, UT, Albany, GA, Anchorage, AK, Thibodaux, LA, San Luis Obispo, CA, Gainesville, GA, Sioux Falls, SD, Monroe, LA.
What are the odds that 16 of the 25 cities with the most rapidly increasing crime would be “college towns” and more particularly towns with what, if we’re brutally honest, are second and third tier schools. You don’t see Berkeley or Palo Alto, CA, on the list, or Austin, TX, or Athens, GA, either.
The campuses in many of these cities came about to educate the GIs or the Baby Boom overflows that the flagship schools couldn’t accomodate. Or, like the campus I worked at, were long-time teachers or tech colleges that elaborated into so-called “comprehensive universities” where the research mission played second fiddle to the teaching mission. As such, they lack the prestige associated with the research mission.
What is there about such campuses which might be a magnet for violent crime? As birth rates dropped, such schools have had to recruit as students individuals they formerly did not accept in order to keep the doors open and the lights on. In particular these are students from population subsets which commit more than their share of our nation’s violent crime.
Actually, most of the increased crime isn’t committed by students, minority or otherwise, but by their friends, relatives, homies, and hangers-on. Students are often the victims, getting robbed of smart phones, laptops, etc. on their way home from the library or a night class, or finding their car broken into or stolen. Non-date rapes happen around campuses too.
Having spent a career teaching in second and third tier schools, I recognized far too many names on that list of 25. It isn’t surprising that the story’s author, a non-academic, didn’t spot this fact. Generally, these are not the world-famous campuses.
It is unlikely chance alone would explain roughly 2/3 of the towns with most rapidly growing violent crime also would be home to second and third tier colleges and universities. Correlation ≠ causation, but the linkage is certainly suspicious.
