A lot of crime isn’t getting prosecuted. Most criminals are treated as catch and release. More on reddit.com

American cities do not have more crime, that's the simple answer. If you compare London to NYC For instance NYC and London have similar populations NYC had 14k robberies in 2021 and London had 24k NYC 1,400 Rapes London9k what America has in abundance is lethal crime. There's a pretty famous paper from back in the 1990's that looked at this and has repeatedly held up over time is that the US on average has comparable crime but our crimes are more deadly (for obvious reasons) More on reddit.com

So I want to point out a couple things: For starters, yes, homicides are down - but homicide numbers are largely skewed by gang violence in a small number of areas most people don’t go to. It's not necessarily representative of the type of crime people see and fear day to day. Property crime is trending up; this is real. The increase in property crime looks moderate at an overall national level, but it's more pronounced in specific areas. Like I live in the San Francisco Bay Area. Brazen theft from stores, car break ins, and tolerance of open air drug use have skyrocketed in the past 5 years. Walking through downtown SF in 2019 vs today is night and day difference. And Oakland, OMG - a city that was trending up a few years ago looks like back to a war zone today. You can see it in the shops that have closed, you can see it on reddit boards in the cities, and you can see it in us recalling our DA and everyone looking to clean house in the elections. London Breed (our mayor) is rapidly trying to clean up now that she fears her job. The police try to paint rosier crime stats, but every local knows its because reporting has plummeted because the police don't do shit. This is seen in a few other cities - Portland is the poster child, but Seattle, Portland, LA, Philly, etc have had their recent issues. While I don't think this smaller number of cities is necessarily representative of America as a whole, it is evidence that a particular brand of BLM - defund the police rhetoric really did have its advocates and has some big failure data points. Those downtown cores of major cosmopolitan cities have majorly outsized impact even if their stats get masked in national averages. Like the theatre district of SF being blighted impacts an enormous metro region of 8+ million people, and impacts tourism / conventions / entertainment to the larger region. Yes republicans will probably play this up and fear monger and paint a worse picture than it is like they always do to us here in San Francisco, but the locals of these places ARE pissed and there is a real issue and not some purely fabricated scare tactic. More on reddit.com

Not sure if this response will be acceptable for this subreddit, as it is more along the lines of a scientific explanation than a purely historical one, but there are a few theories as to why there was such a precipitous drop in crime during that period. The ubiquity and subsequent removal of environmental lead, mostly in the form of gasoline and paint, is commonly theorized to be a major contributing factor to both the preceding rise and subsequent fall of crime during that period, with many different journal articles showing evidence of a correlation existing. This article from Juvenile Justice Information Exchange Organization does a good job of summarizing much of it. That lead is known to cause structural changes to a developing brain is well known, and we also know that environmental lead levels have decreased since changes in legislation required the removal from gasoline and paints. That decline in lead lines up with a delayed decline in the rate of crime, which is what you'd expect if this hypothesis were true. There are of course other theories, like the one made popular by Steven Levitts book Freakanomics which focuses on the correlation between abortion and the subsequent decline in crime, showing that those states which legalized abortion earlier showed earlier declines in crime than those whose laws were changed by the Roe v. Wade ruling. The theory hinges on the idea that those children aborted are more likely to be born to less ideal familial situations and therefore are more likely to commit crimes, and aborting them allows for that crime to not occur. Both of these are just theories based on correlations, but both are fairly well supported by the evidence. More on reddit.com