If abortion cuts crime, does it make sense to view it as the worst act of all?

When it comes to crime, we always start with the problem and the people who cause it.

Which seems a good and logical place to begin. It is, after all, precisely where we start when we look at other problems, like mental illness. Psychiatrist Raj Persaud, however, maintains this approach is flawed.

“Psychologists and psychiatrists have focused their research on those who do badly under stress and become ill,” he writes.

“This focus has always puzzled me. Studying the sick is obviously an essential side of the research, but it only provides part of the story.”

Applied to crime, that observation would suggest we might more productively look at countries where the crime rate has fallen, find out why it has fallen in those countries, and borrow their methodology for application to Ireland.

Indeed, this was done, to a certain extent, at the end of the nineties, when there was much talk of “Zero Tolerance,” based on policing styles perceived to have contributed to the dropping crime rate in some American cities.

Zero Tolerance had a great ring to it. More to the point, it had statistics backing it up. The cities where it had been used had less crime. The only problem was that, in America at the time, cities where it had NOT been used also experienced a drop in crime. Murders, rapes and robberies declined.

Zero Tolerance was closely related to what’s been called the Broken Window Theory, which proposes that small problems grow into big ones.

If someone breaks a window and gets away with it, they may decide breaking windows is an acceptable activity and progress to torching buildings.

(The AA’s Conor Faughnan applies the broken window theory to road safety, suggesting that the kind of people who do the minor infringements attracting penalty points as of today are the kind of people who speed and drive with drink taken.) Rudy Giuliani, the Mayor of New York who showed such admirable leadership in the aftermath of 9/11, played a key role in implementing these notions as public policy.

He appointed a man named William Bratton to head up the police force. Bratton, who wrote one of the best autobiographies of the last decade before falling foul of ethics codes and retreating to obscurity, made his officers act on the small crimes that, at the time, tended to be ignored by the cops. Suddenly, the young lad who decided to jump a subway turnstile rather than pay for his journey found himself in front of a judge. The woman who solicited was hauled off to clink. The man who urinated against a wall, ditto.

The crime rate dropped. Clearly, the thug who got his comeuppance for jumping the turnstile was prevented from going on to become an armed robber.

The woman stopped taking the drugs that caused her to prostitute herself and got herself a good job on Wall Street instead. The man who peed in public developed a new sense of the community and its rights to a city unpolluted by his waste products.

Politicians elsewhere - including in Ireland - looked at the widely-publicised New York experience and determined to learn its lessons.

New York, for a while, was awash in visiting police VIPs from other jurisdictions, many of them European. Yet the same policies, applied elsewhere, did not seem to produce quite the same results.

Some observers explained the discrepancy by reference to police numbers: not much point in a statement of Zero Tolerance if garda numbers have failed to match the growth in population and in crime.

Even less point if large numbers of those gardaí are behind desks, doing idiotic and incredibly boring tasks like stamping the application forms of individuals who, having lost their driver’s license, need to get a new one.

According to an American economist, while those explanations for the failure of the Zero Tolerance and Broken Window approaches outside of New York may carry a germ of truth, the real issue is how little effect those innovative policing approaches actually had in the jurisdiction where they were most touted.

Steven D Levitt, from the University of Chicago, who recently won America’s top award for the best economist under forty years of age, has established that crime started to drop in New York in 1990.

Murder and property crime had gone down by a fifth at the end of 1993. Giuliani didn’t become mayor until the following year. 1994 was also the year Bratton was installed as Chief of Police.

Long before either of them started their jobs, police presence in the city had increased.

But - according to Levitt - the multiplication of police numbers, while it may have contributed to New York’s crime-reduction, may also distract from something of much more importance.

“Crime went down EVERYWHERE during the 1990’s,” Levitt writes in his book, ‘Freakonomics.’

“Few other cities tried the kind of strategies that New York did, and certainly none with the same zeal.

“But even in Los Angeles, a city notorious for bad policing, crime fell at about the same rate as it did in New York once the growth in New York’s police force is accounted for.”

Levitt isn’t claiming that either Zero Tolerance or Broken Window are bad methods. He’s just drawing attention to the fact that if a nation the size of the US experiences a drop in crime across all states simultaneously, it’s illogical to attribute that drop in one city to a policing approach peculiar to that city.

He is simply saying that the popular explanations for the crime drop - such as Zero Tolerance and Broken Window - are not true.

He is saying that another factor, which came into play 20 years before the crime drop, had greatly contributed to it. That factor was the legalising of abortion.

“One study has shown that the typical child who went unborn in the earliest years of legalised abortion would have been 50% more likely than average to live in poverty; he would have also been 60% more likely to grow up with one parent... In other words, the very factors that drove millions of American women to have an abortion also seemed to predict that their children, had they been born, would have led unhappy and possibly criminal lives.”

Levitt demonstrates that the states where abortion first became cheaply available were precisely the states which, two decades later, were the earliest to experience the drop in crime.

“And the crime rate,” he adds, “continued to fall as an entire generation came of age minus the children whose mothers had not wanted to bring a child into the world. Legalised abortion led to less unwantedness; unwantedness leads to high crime; legalised abortion, therefore, led to less crime.”

The proposition that abortion prevented the birth of a generation who stood the greatest chance of becoming criminals, and who would, at the time crime rates fell, have been at the age when young men enter their criminal prime, makes perfect sense.

Unless, of course, you believe that abortion is itself the worst kind of violent crime against the most vulnerable victim...