The Real Crime Wave

Violent crime is down, property crime is down, but labor violations are up and nobody gives a damn.

This chart is from a report that the Pew Research Center posted online last month. Crime is a little bit like inflation in that people think it goes up even when it goes down. During the three decades covered by the above charts, nearly every Gallup poll showed 60 percent or more claiming the crime rate was going up nationally even as it was going down. For most of that time only a minority said crime was going up in their neighborhoods, but lately a 55 percent majority has said that.

In the District of Columbia, where I live, violent crime actually did shoot up 40 percent last year, driven largely by armed robbery and carjackings, and the homicide rate rose to its highest point in two decades. Two members of Congress were crime victims—one assaulted in her apartment building, another held up at gunpoint in a carjacking. But D.C. was an outlier, and this year, I’m pleased to report, violent and property crimes are down for the first three months of 2024.

The crime rate nobody talks about concerns the violation of labor laws by white-collar managers. That is genuinely out of control, particularly when it comes to child labor. Since 2014, the number of child labor violations has quadrupled. The number of unfair labor charges filed with the National Labor Relations Board stands at its highest level since 2017, and wage theft (violations of minimum wage and overtime laws) reduces paychecks by $50 billion annually, or more than half of what retail outlets lose each year from shoplifting. Shoplifting is a huge national story. Labor violations are not, because America doesn’t take them seriously, as demonstrated by the pitiful civil penalties imposed. That’s the subject of my latest New Republic piece. You can read it here.