No one has anything of value to steal anymore. Electronics are cheap nowadays and everything is subscription based.
Who has money for gold jewelry and priceless heirlooms? You gna steal grandmas fake dishes off home shopping network from the 80s?
Only thing worth and significant value in a suburban home is the catalytic converter off your car. Everything else is plastic crap from Walmart and junk off the internet.
This is interesting, but I’ve grown suspicious of the Econ101 idea that everything is explained by the incentives imposed on rational actors.
Murder and rape rates has fallen along with property crime as the article points out. But nationwide murder clearance rate is like 50% and the rape numbers are much worse than that. So somehow I don’t think the proximate cause of crime reduction is the due to the diligence of pigs.
The author doesn’t disagree with you - they cite all sorts of reasons and that isn’t one of them
And these numbers may just touch the surface. Police-reported crime is partly a measure of crime and partly a measure of reporting crime. In a high-crime environment, people often stop calling the police for “smaller” thefts — because the expectation becomes that nothing will happen, or because the hassle isn’t worth it. So even these ugly numbers likely understate how saturated daily life could feel with property crime.
Saved y’all a click
not to be rude, but this in no way encapsulates the main points in the article.
actual reasons given are:
- better physical security (locks, lighting, alarms, controlled building entry)
- surveillance technology (doorbell cameras, building cameras, smartphones)
- less profitable theft (cheaper electronics, tracking devices, decline of cash)
- higher perceived risk of getting caught
“The bottom line is that we changed our environment in a way that made burglary and robbery harder to pull off, less profitable, and more likely to fail.“
I think “less profitable theft” is a big one. What is there worth stealing in a house these days?
Laptops. Jewelry, particularly gold.
Phones and ipads can usually be locked down. While that is possible for laptops, it’s not typical, except for the log in. It’s becoming more common, which is good for overall crime.
TVs, game consoles
Well TVs… think about that again, Price of TVs has gone down, size has gone up. pick up a nice 50" or 70" TV for $200 or less.
Big, hard to move, fragile… Very bulky, very non descrete… and pawn shops are kind of over loaded with them so… big cut in price.
Games consoles are probably it, but obviously only a hand full per house, and thanks to the modern era having more digital games, accounts etc… New risks in ways you can get caught and you can’t steal the games with it.
TVs, game consoles
Lets say the theft is successful of a TV or game console. The thief likely wants cash, not consumer electronics. So they need a way to convert stolen goods into cash. Any TV worth money worth bothering with is also very large and fragile which is a problem for offloading it. Sure, there’s craigslist and facebook marketplace, but there aren’t many that will buy a TV off of those because of the likelihood something is already wrong with it, and TVs just aren’t that expensive new. Many consoles also have a theft reporting function that will block or limit how the console can be used. I imagine this also make theft of a console a high risk, low reward path.
But the data doesn’t support any of those reasons. But they do have data showing less reporting… So…
actual data in the article:
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direct crime statistics: 80% drop in burglaries, 66% drop in property crime overall, FBI data showing 2023-2024 had the sharpest single-year decline on record
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academic citation: a 2021 paper that “directly links the startling drop in burglary to security improvements”
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specific numbers: Chicago went from 50,000 burglaries to much lower levels
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It wasn’t tech that solved this issue, it was legislation. The avenues for hawking your wares became much smaller and more scrutinized, therefore much harder to make a buck selling people’s shit.
Interesting suggestion of profitability of stolen goods. Might also mention de-leaded gasoline tho…
Article is a big pile of verbal bloat with a few bits of actual info to pick out. The comments here summarize it pretty well.