A study conducted by Berkeley's Earl Warren Legal Institute concludes that costly wars on crime are doomed to failure in the United States because they are attacking the wrong problem. Lawmakers need to craft a sophisticated response that specifically addresses death-dealing mayhem, say the authors, Franklin Zimring, professor of law and director of the Earl Warren Legal Institute, and Gordon Hawkins, senior fellow at the institute. Burglary and theft rates in the United States are comparable to those in other Western developed countries, Zimring and Hawkins found. The United States has about the same level of common crimes and the same number of criminals as many other nations. Even the likelihood of becoming a victim of an assault is higher in Australia, New Zealand and Canada than in the United States, crime rates show.
Lethal violence is a distinctively American problem.
The rate of criminal homicide here is four to 14 times higher than in other Western, industrialized nations. That is what Americans fear, but the common belief is that the high rate of killings is the natural consequence of a large number of criminals and a high crime rate. Not so, say the authors of this new study. They compare burglary and robbery in New York City and London in 1992. London had about 20,000 more such crimes than New York, but seven people were killed during burglaries or robberies in London, while 378 were killed during such crimes in New York.