I tend to treat crime as a trailing indicator of the economy overall. Lower-crime rates correlate with lower unemployment, and vice-versa. Of course, every po

I tend to treat crime as a trailing indicator of the economy overall. Lower-crime rates correlate with lower unemployment, and vice-versa. Of course, every police department is going to pretend they've developed some novel new crime fighting methods – instead of just realizing that, hey, less poor people means less crime. Homicides are interesting in isolation, because so many of our domestic homicides are gun-and-drug violence. One of the hypothesis in drug legalization was that homicide rates would decrease. That hasn't really proven out yet.