America does do a very commendable job of keeping track of all sorts of statistics and from those statistics is able often to see patterns and therefore to solve puzzles. When it comes to crime, the conversation of such, often seems to clearly miscomprehend those numbers, so that reciting how many crimes there are per 100,000 people, or the murder rate in a given city, as proof positive, that things are either improving or getting worse, is fundamentally looking at crime through the wrong lens.
In point of fact, most crime, that is not white collar crime, is often localized, and it is localized because criminals typically ply their trade in areas of the city that they congregate in and are intimately familiar with. So then, in a given city, crime is never going to be uniform from one community to the next but rather we see that some communities have a very high proportion of crime in comparison to their population base, whereas other parts of the community have virtually no crime, whatsoever. The reason that this is so, is myriad, of which relevant attributes of crime or the lack thereof, comes down to the income level of that particular area, the schools, the parks, the family structure, the educational level, the density of population, the age of population, and so on and so forth. In other words, for instance, an area of the community in which all the homes are very nice, single family homes, that necessitate a good amount of wealth to own one, in which, these homes are surrounded by no high-density apartments and in addition, have the accouterments of good shopping stores as well as other good infrastructure nearby, aren't going to have much crime, for the very people that live and congregate there, do not have the conditions that would nurture, criminality. On the other hand, areas of high density in conjunction with low income, as well as dilapidated homes, and poor infrastructure are going to often suffer more than fair share of crime, because the conditions of that community, pretty much creates crime.
That is to say, the lack of capital, the lack of good infrastructure, the lack of good schools, the lack of good family structure, the lack of education, and the lack of opportunity, poses a clear and present danger to the not only the safety but the overall demeanor and temperature of a given community. The reason that this is so, is that crime, while it may have many fathers, fundamentally originates from people that are impoverished in the sense of their lack of opportunity, hope, and money. Those that have little or nothing, and further do not have a lot of constructive things that are available for them to do, are going to be susceptible to criminal activities.
All of this means, that most crime and criminal activities are within the communities that are impoverished to begin with, and while law and order resources devoted to eradicating such crime in those neighborhoods may indeed find much success in prosecuting that criminal element, it will not in and of itself, eliminate criminality, until such time as the conditions that create crime, are ameliorated fundamentally. While there are all sorts of pundits that demand that people own up to the responsibility for their bad actions, those pundits doing the talking, don't often come from milieus that are hopeless, let alone, forsaken.
The bottom line is that to find crime and to find the criminals behind that crime is easy. To reduce and to eliminate crime is the difficult task, and it is not something that simply comes down to "just say no," but rather is dependent upon all the people of this great nation living within a construct in which each of them truly has a good home, a living wage, fair and equal justice applied to all, and a good helping hand for all those in need. America has the capital to do exactly that, but has made a conscious choice not to do so. The crime, it suffers from, is clearly the result of a system that fundamentally fails to live up to the tenets of justice, egalitarianism, fairness, hope, and opportunity.
That then is the true crime.