The Long-Term Decline In America’s Murder Rate

Via Alex Tabarrok, the striking long-term decline in murder in the United States:

This also helps us understand the context for the big crime spike of the 1960s-1980s as a quite large deviation from an important driver of progress. Many liberals of the time erred seriously in dismissing public concern about crime as merely racial anxiety. It surely was that, in part, but it was also anxiety about crime! Provision of a decent level of law and order is one of the trickiest but also most important public services, and it’s crucial to keep making progress on this front.