Crime analysts differ over whether an economic downturn always precedes an increase in crime. Since last summer, when the first signs of disaster started to appear on Wall Street, law enforcement officials have been tracking domestic violence and property offenses (made up of robbery, burglary and theft) to see if there’s a direct correlation between recession and higher rates of crime.

In Fitchburg, Massachusetts for example, police say they’ve seen 22 robberies in two months. That’s an unprecedented number for any similar time period in the city. The chief says that  three or four robberies a month are the norm. If you break down those robberies by type, the numbers are even more dramatic.

Thefts from cars have jumped by 164 from last year, and vehicle thefts have more than doubled.

“This is something we’ve never seen before,” the chief says. “There has to be some correlation” to the economy. An October survey of 180 law enforcement agencies by the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF), a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, found that 75 percent indicated that they had seen a recent rise in at least one category of property crime.

And the National Domestic Violence Hotline reported a 21 percent increase in calls for help in September and 18 percent in October from the same periods last year. Alfred Blumstein, a Carnegie Mellon University criminologist, says it may take a year or two to determine whether the economy has driven more people to crime largely because the crime numbers for a given year aren’t available for 12 months or more after that year.

But not everyone says the major factor in the uptick in certain types of crime can be connected to the economy.David Kennedy, director of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, says the demand for illegal drugs drives crime more than a sagging economy.

Major surges in crime, he says, have been traced to Prohibition and to the cocaine and crack epidemic of the late 1980s and ‘90s. “The public concern is that a tidal wave is coming,” he told the USA Today’s Kevin Johnson in a recent interview. “Unless it is being driven by some other drug epidemic, that’s not going to happen.”

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