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Cash and Crime
“CASH”, wrote Marcus Felson, an outstandingAmerican criminologist, “is the mother’s milk of crime.” Its appeal tocriminals is clear. Unlike cars or paintings, it can be concealed immediatelyafter being pinched. It has no security features to prevent its being easilyand anonymously spent on legal or illegal goods. Unlike nearly any other objectthat can be stolen, it needs no fence.
Criminals’ need for cash motivates much predatorystreet crime. A new paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research askswhether this might work in reverse： if cash motivates crime, could the absence of cashreduce crime? The answer seems to be yes.
The paper looks at county-level crime data inMissouri from 1990 to 2011, a period when crime dropped markedly all over therich world. During this time Missouri, like the rest of America, changed theway it delivered its welfare and food-stamp benefits. Instead of paper chequesstates now use a debit-card system known as Electronic Benefit Transfer （EBT). Missouri introduced EBT cards in eight phasesover 12 months. This gradual shift allowed the authors to analyse not justdifferences in crime rates before and after the introduction of EBT, but alsohow those differences compared with changes during the same period in countiesthat had not implemented it.
They found that electronic payments led to a dropof 9.8% in the overall crime rate and caused the rates of burglary, assault andlarceny to fall by 7.9%, 12.5% and 9.6%, respectively. The introduction of EBTwas also associated with a lower number of arrests, an indication that thecrime rate’s decline did not stem from more aggressive policing. EBT’s effectson non-property-related crimes such as drug offences were statisticallyinsignificant. The findings suggest, according to Volkan Topalli, one of theauthors, that “for people in densely populated urban neighbourhoods, the lesscash they have and the more their transactions are digitised, the lessattractive criminal targets they make.”
It points to something broader, too. The sharpdecline in crime since the 1990s has led to a rash of theories to explain it:ageing populations, higher incarceration and immigration rates, less exposureto lead paint, better police tactics as well as vastly improved security ofboth products and places Mr. Topalli’s paper suggests that the shift from cashto cards—since 1990 debit-card transactions have risen 27-fold, whereas cashvolume has grown by just 4% a year—may also have contributed to the decline incrime. It’s hard to rip and run, after all, without something to rip.
Cash and Crime
“CASH”, wrote Marcus Felson, an outstandingAmerican criminologist, “is the mother’s milk of crime.” Its appeal tocriminals is clear. Unlike cars or paintings, it can be concealed immediatelyafter being pinched. It has no security features to prevent its being easilyand anonymously spent on legal or illegal goods. Unlike nearly any other objectthat can be stolen, it needs no fence.
Criminals’ need for cash motivates much predatorystreet crime. A new paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research askswhether this might work in reverse： if cash motivates crime, could the absence of cashreduce crime? The answer seems to be yes.
The paper looks at county-level crime data inMissouri from 1990 to 2011, a period when crime dropped markedly all over therich world. During this time Missouri, like the rest of America, changed theway it delivered its welfare and food-stamp benefits. Instead of paper chequesstates now use a debit-card system known as Electronic Benefit Transfer （EBT). Missouri introduced EBT cards in eight phasesover 12 months. This gradual shift allowed the authors to analyse not justdifferences in crime rates before and after the introduction of EBT, but alsohow those differences compared with changes during the same period in countiesthat had not implemented it.
They found that electronic payments led to a dropof 9.8% in the overall crime rate and caused the rates of burglary, assault andlarceny to fall by 7.9%, 12.5% and 9.6%, respectively. The introduction of EBTwas also associated with a lower number of arrests, an indication that thecrime rate’s decline did not stem from more aggressive policing. EBT’s effectson non-property-related crimes such as drug offences were statisticallyinsignificant. The findings suggest, according to Volkan Topalli, one of theauthors, that “for people in densely populated urban neighbourhoods, the lesscash they have and the more their transactions are digitised, the lessattractive criminal targets they make.”
It points to something broader, too. The sharpdecline in crime since the 1990s has led to a rash of theories to explain it:ageing populations, higher incarceration and immigration rates, less exposureto lead paint, better police tactics as well as vastly improved security ofboth products and places Mr. Topalli’s paper suggests that the shift from cashto cards—since 1990 debit-card transactions have risen 27-fold, whereas cashvolume has grown by just 4% a year—may also have contributed to the decline incrime. It’s hard to rip and run, after all, without something to rip.
