Did mobile phones cause the crime collapse?

That little thing in your pocket is the greatest law enforcement tool in history

You wouldn’t know it if you judged the public mood, but life in Britain today is far safer than it once was. Crime has fallen considerably in my lifetime, with violent offending down by 75% since the 1990s.

This is despite the fact that there have been substantial cuts to police since 2010, with the majority of London’s stations closing down. 

Britain has had quite a low murder rate throughout modern history, but there was a time when London felt quite unsafe. My memory of adolescence in the capital is tinged with a certain menace, and I don’t think this is entirely my glass-is-half-empty-but-looks-even-emptier approach to life.

I remember coming home one Friday to see on the news that a headmaster had been stabbed to death outside his own school, not far from my home and in an area I knew very well. I remember one horrific crime where a woman was gang raped near a canal a mile or two from where I lived; I remember the story of a young man, a friend of a friend, who was murdered on Hungerford Bridge for fun. 

Certain Tube lines felt pretty unsafe, the Bakerloo in particular prone to a notorious steaming gang (and such gangs also attacked banks). Suburban rail lines were even worse, and I remember the feeling of dread on the North London Line (as it was then) when an overtly menacing group of teenage boys entered the carriage. There was that furtive look, the half glances between passengers, and the horrific knowledge that none of us could have done anything to stop them – because nobody had mobile phones.

Those little devices we all carry around are getting a bad rep at the moment. I’m about 80% convinced by Jonathan Haidt’s argument that they have a negative impact on teen mental health, but I wouldn’t have enough confidence in my own views beyond a suspicion that it sounds plausible, and there are people whose opinion I respect who disagree. I’m sure that banning phones in schools is probably a good idea, though. Yet mobile phones have played a huge part in one positive trend – crime reduction.

Today those sort of 1990s horror crimes are much less common, although they do happen. This is not because the British people have undergone a great remoralisation, but that all but the stupidest criminals know that there is almost zero chance of escaping punishment. Someone will call the police, or film them, or at the very least their mobile phone record will trap the perpetrators.

That is why murders in London at least tend to be heavily composed of inter-gang stabbings by teenagers with very low impulse control, domestic violence (the hardest for authorities to prevent), or involve people with mental health problems who shouldn’t have been out.

At least a couple of studies have looked into the effect of mobile phones on crime. One, from Columbia University, found that ‘the proliferation of mobile phones may explain 19 to 29 percent of the decline in homicides between 1990 to 2000, during which time the total annual number of murders dropped from about 25,000 to 15,000.’

The mechanism for this drop was that mobiles reduced the need for drug dealers to use the streets, but a more significant - and obvious - explanation for the link between mobile phones and crime is that they make detection easier.

One study at the University of Pennsylvania suggested while mobile phone use led to an initial upsurge in theft – because they were being stolen – this does not last and is countered by the surveillance effect once mobiles become more widespread. An increase of a million phone subscriptions a year was associated with 5 fewer violent crimes per 100,000 people, a one per cent drop, and the authors estimated that ‘an increase of a standard deviation in mobile phone subscriptions would imply effects 7 times as large’. Unlike other forms of deterrent, like burglar alarms, ‘the near-universal adoption of mobile phones makes these devices less likely to produce negative externalities noted in other investments in private security, like burglar alarms and security fences, that displace crime to other targets.’

Today mobile phone use is close to ubiquitous, and coverage continues to improve everywhere – even on the Tube, meaning that no criminal is safe.

There is another technological factor to the crime reduction, that adolescents who might once have been out fighting and getting into trouble are stuck at home gaming, but in part there is an understanding that, even if they wanted to go out and misbehave, they would almost certainly be caught.

Crime has been reduced, if not solved, by technological solutions, although many will find it unsatisfying. As Tom Chivers wrote a while back, many people are uncomfortable with ‘solutionism’, the ‘foolhardy belief that technology can sidestep thorny social and political problems’. Those worried ‘about solutionism say that, instead of finding technological quick fixes for society’s ills, we ought to concentrate on the root causes: to change our social structures, to change our behaviour, to change policy.’

But technology has solved a lot of problems, from natural gas ovens reducing the suicide rate to recent anti-obesity drugs, the human papilloma virus vaccine, HIV treatments and (to some extent) unwanted pregnancy via the Pill. These are all social problems that might have been reduced by a campaign of moralisation, by encouraging more self-control and self-denial, but technological solutions work, and are easier.

Many have trade-offs; indeed the Pill reduced fertility so successfully that almost every first world country now faces huge economic strain as a result of an ageing population. Mobile phones might have all sorts of negative effects, and may be turning the next generation into a bunch of Hamas-loving romantically dysfunctional neurotics, but let’s look on the bright side - their impact on public safety.

The frustrating thing about crime in Britain is not the fear of something awful happening, but the proliferation of everyday, life-sapping offences like shoplifting, theft and burglary, which are needlessly common because we allow repeat offenders the freedom to make life a misery for those around them. If we were capable of building more prisons to incapacitate this relatively small number of incorrigible criminals, and with the availability of modern technology, we could reduce crime to 1950s levels without re-adopting that era’s moral norms and restraints. When it comes to serious crime, we should be pleased that we’re no longer in the Nineties, but we could be getting to Japan if we wanted. We have the means - indeed they’re sitting in our pocket.