Doing Quantitative Data Analysis in Criminological Research

During the roughly fifty years following the Second World War, the best evidence we have from recorded crimes and victimisation surveys suggests that the level and rate of crime rose in almost all countries for which data are available. The increases seemed to be inexorable. Then, first in the United States and after that in many other countries and against expectations crime began to fall and to do so precipitously. Moreover the falls were more than temporary blips: they have been sustained. The changes in direction in crime trajectories took almost all by surprise. They had not been expected by policy-makers, journalists, the general public or, for that matter, criminologists. It seemed to us that the international crime drop poses perhaps the most pressing questions for criminology: What exactly was happening to crime rates and why had they begun to fall? At the time of writing we have spent close to a decade working on the crime drop, trying both to describe it more precisely and to explain it.