On the Origins of the Crime Drop: Vehicle Crime and Security in the 1980s
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/hojo.12158 |
| Published date | 01 May 2016 |
| Date | 01 May 2016 |
The Howard Journal Vol55 No 1–2. May 2016 DOI: 10.1111/hojo.12158
ISSN 2059-1098, pp. 226–237
On the Origins of the Crime Drop:
Vehicle Crime and Security in
the 1980s
GRAHAM FARRELL and RICK BROWN
Graham Farrell is Professor of International and Comparative Criminal
Justice, Centre for Criminal Justice Studies, School of Law, University of
Leeds; Rick Brown is Deputy Director (Research), Australian Institute of
Criminology, Canberra, Australia
Abstract: The study adds to crime-drop research examining the security hypothesis. It
provides evidence that effective security was introduced for some high-risk vehicles from
the mid-1980s in England and Wales and causally connects this to a gradual change
in the vehicle-related theft rate. Followingthree decades of exponential increase to 1987,
the rate of increase slowed and continued to decelerate to a 1993 peak. Thereafter the
rate fell slowly at first then rapidly from 1995. It is concluded that: (i) what became
the change in the rate of vehicle-related theft began in the 1980s, which is earlier than
typically understood; and (ii) the gradual arc of the theft rate over more than a decade is
consistent with new security gradually permeating the vehicle fleet.
Keywords: vehicle-related theft; car theft; crime drop; crime decline; security
hypothesis
The term ‘international crime drop’ (Tseloni et al. 2010; Knepper 2012;
van Dijk, Tseloni and Farrell 2012; Farrell, Tilley and Tseloni 2014; Tonry
2014) denotes the breadth of crime’s decline in recent decades. A broad
set of acquisitive crimes fell in England and Wales from 1992 and personal
crimes from 1995. Burglary and theft had been falling in the United States
from the early 1980s, then car theft and violence from 1991. National
victim surveys in France and the Netherlands show crime drops from the
mid-1990s, and to the extent that it can be reliably determined, the story
is similar across Europe, North America, the antipodes and elsewhere.
Improved vehicle security,particularly electronic immobilisers and cen-
tral deadlocking, has been causally linked to the decline in vehicle theft in
Australia, England and Wales, Germany, the Netherlands and the United
States (Bӓssmann 2011; Brown and Thomas 2003; Brown 2004, 2013;
Farrell et al. 2011a; Farrell, Tseloni and Tilley 2011b; Fujita and Max-
field 2012; Kriven and Ziersch 2007; Potter and Thomas 2001; van Ours
and Vollaard 2015). This evidence supports the security hypothesis which
posits that crime fell due to improved security of different types with little
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2016 The Authors. The Howard Journal of Crime and Justice published by John Wiley &
Sons Ltd. and The Howard League
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