Dangerous driving and London's draft policing plan

The Mayor's Office for Policing and Crime (MOPAC) are currently consulting on a draft Police and Crime plan for London, to cover the period 2013-17. You can read the draft here and there's a short survey about it here. The London Assembly are carrying out a review into the draft plan too, which you can read about here. The MOPAC consultation runs until 6 March while you have until 15 February if you want to tell the Assembly your views.

The top priority in the draft plan is to:

Hold the Metropolitan Police to account for delivering the Mayor’s goal of driving down the key crimes of burglary, vandalism, theft of, and theft from motor vehicles, violence with injury, robbery and theft from the person by a total of 20%.

That list of key crimes notably excludes any mention of dangerous driving, as does the document as a whole. This is despite concerns over dangerous driving and road safety featuring prominently in previous police consultations:

• The 2010/11 Metropolitan Police Service annual report said that  "Road safety has featured consistently in the top five public priorities for policing, with speeding and dangerous driving major concerns".
• TfL's draft road safety plan said "The Metropolitan Police Authority's 'Have Your Say on Policing in London' consultation, which ran between June and November 2010, show that traffic and road related issues are the top priority for those who took part. Particular concerns identified in the consultation focus on road safety issues."

If anyone thinks London's policing plan should include something about improving road safety and tackling dangerous driving, then please do respond to the consultation (and to the Assembly review, while you're at it), saying so.

The amazing fall in urban crime rates, and the downside

The Economist has an article about the sharp decline in crime in American cities since the early 1990s, noting that there is no consensus over what caused it. This disagreement isn't that surprising since so many factors may be contributing to crime at once, and since the debate also has some ideological and political significance.

But it is really worth emphasising just how large has been the drop in crime in US cities, because it's important not just on its own terms but for what it says about where our cities are headed. The longest reliable historical record of crime in US cities is probably the homicide rate in New York City, which the late Eric Monkkonen compiled for every year between 1800 and 1999. You can find his data series here. It includes not just the number of homicides but the rate per 100,000 residents, and I have updated the series to 2011 with homicide data from the NYPD and population data from Wikipedia. 

I think there is good evidence for the theory that lead poisoning (from car exhaust and lead paint) had a lot to do with these trends, partly because it helps explain why crime rates fell not just in the US but across Europe too (see Kevin Drum on this subject, including relevant links). I'm sure improvements in policing helped too. But in a way what caused the fall in crime is less interesting than what knock-on effects it will have.

People understandably put a high value on safety and are willing to pay a price premium to live in low-crime areas. So you would expect the fall in urban crime levels to have contributed to higher urban house prices, and at least in the case of New York you would be right - this research estimates that falling crime rates explain about a third of the mid-1990s increase in NYC house prices.

These price rises show that people really value the safer urban environments created by lower crime. But higher housing costs may not be good news for everyone, especially tenants facing higher rents. If New York City had built a lot of new housing to cope with rising housing demand it would have been able to moderate (but probably not eliminate) these price increases and allow more people to enjoy living in a great city with falling crime rates, but instead higher demand fed straight into higher prices. It would be tragic if this pattern was repeated elsewhere and low-income people pushed out of cities just as they finally become more liveable.

Big differences in attitudes to speeding by age, gender and income

The Department for Transport have published some fascinating research recently (funded by the previous government, I imagine) which has unfortunately received very little media attention, presumably because they have chosen not to highlight it themselves by spoon-feeding the media with press releases and the like. In December they released the results of a big survey into attitudes towards transport and climate change (which I picked out some cycling-related factoids from) and now we've got the results of a survey into attitudes towards road safety. I'm just going to highlight one particular aspect below, but I would encourage you to read the report and/or the accompanying tables yourself.

According to table A1.12 here, 21% of respondents think the level of police enforcement for speeding is 'too high', 45% 'about right' and 33% 'too low'. Seeing as speeding is also dangerous for drivers and pedestrians and costly for society as a whole, you might wonder why the police don't enforce the law on this more strongly. Then you look at the detailed breakdowns:

• Men are slightly more likely to think there is too much enforcement than too little, while women are three times as likely to think there is too little. 
• Those on low incomes (up to £15k a year) are two to three times as likely to think there is too little enforcement as too much, in contrast to those on higher incomes who are more likely to think there is too much than too little.
• Around half of the elderly (aged 75 or over) think there is too little enforcement of the speed limit, compared to only 12% who think there is too much.
• Drivers are almost evenly split on the issue, while three times as many non-drivers think there is too little enforcement as think there is too much. 

We shouldn't ignore the substantial fraction of people (40% to 50% in most socioeconomic groups) who think current enforcement levels are 'about right', but I think these figures should still be of concern to the police and the government. On one side you've got groups of people who have historically been fairly culturally dominant (i.e who are affluent, male, middle-aged or all three) and who by their own account are also more likely to drive (see table A1.1),  to break speed limits (table A1.36) and to break them by a lot (table A1.63). These people either think the law is either about right or too harsh. On the other side you've got groups who have often been marginalised (women, the elderly, the poor) who are much less likely to drive, who drive more safely when they do drive, and who think that current levels of enforcement are too low. In an era when the state is meant to be actively promoting 'equalities' (as well as, y'know, enforcing the law), I'd suggest that the police and the government should seriously think about whether they are striking the right balance.