Abstract:
Crime has always been an important topic in every culture. No one wants to live in fear of being stripped of their valuable belongings. In the United States, in particular, crime has consistently risen in the 1970s and 1980s, but significantly dropped in the 1990s. Statistics indicate that 2005 has been one of the safest years in the past thirty years. Overall, in the United States, crime has dropped from 758.1 incidents per 100,000 inhabitants in 1991 to 469.2 in 2005. This has led many analysts to contemplate the reasons behind the drop in crime. What has caused crime to drop so dramatically in the past decade? Is there one main deterrent factor, or is it hard to pinpoint? (See [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]). This research paper focuses on two possible deterrents that have been debated throughout the years, capital punishment and the number of police officers.
