After rising for three years, the nation's murder rate dropped 3.6% last year, according to preliminary figures released Monday by the FBI. The nation's largest cities and rural areas showed the sharpest declines. Murders dropped 7.1% in cities with populations over 1 million, and 12.2% in towns with 10,000 or fewer people, the FBI said.

"This suggests that something fresh and positive is happening," said David Kennedy, director of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. "That's really striking."

Almost exactly one year ago, when homicides fell 3.6% in 2004, David Kennedy found the reversal "striking," and noted that "something fresh and positive is happening." Yet in this past Sunday's Washington Post, he notes a 5% increase the following year, and declares a trend towards anarchistic mayhem just this side of the Road Warrior.

And even recognizing the context that homicides increased from 2001 to 2003, the overall violent crime rate still continued to fall, the yearly increase in murders was under 2%, and the relatively rare incidence of homicides diminishes the obvious value of such small statistical trends. Any given spurt of violence between gangs could proportionally skew the body count. And this should lend any analyst caution when trying to apply definitive reasons for shifts of, say, 5% over one year.

But despite being burned before ...

The celebration about crime reductions should have been tempered by caution. The good news was real enough: In New York City, homicides fell an astonishing 76 percent, from 2,245 in 1990 to 539 in 2005. Most observers -- myself included -- gave a good deal of the credit to the city's newly focused and entrepreneurial police department.

... a recognition of the need for healthy equivocation doesn't slow down David Kennedy. He goes on to further document the severity of the problem by noting large 10-year homicide reductions in select cities that apparently weren't dramatic enough, followed by highlighting very recent trend reversals that still peak far below the peak of the early nineties crime wave:

The national numbers followed suit, but not evenly. Although homicides in New York City dropped to a rate of about 6.6 victims per 100,000 people last year, Buffalo came down from a peak of 90 killings in 1994 but still had 63 homicides in 2003, for a rate of 22 victims per 100,000 residents. And Chicago fell from a 1992 peak of 939 homicides but remained stubbornly in the 600 to 700 range during the next decade, for a 2002 rate of about 22 per 100,000 people.

Many jurisdictions made progress only to lose ground shortly thereafter. Philadelphia peaked at 420 homicides in 1996, fell to 292 in 1999, and climbed back to 380 last year. Boston's 1990s "miracle" ended abruptly as petty rivalries shattered the Ceasefire coalition, and killings increased from 31 in 1999 to 73 in 2005.

At the same time, gang and drug problems were showing up in smaller cities and towns -- another disturbing and largely unnoticed shift. In 2005, jurisdictions with populations between 50,000 and 250,000 saw homicide increases of about 12.5 percent -- far larger than the big cities.

A rise of 12.5% in homicides sounds pretty big, and it is noteworthy. But you're talking about 562 cities with populations between 50,000 - 250,000, who had 2,963 murders in 2004. A rise of 12.5% represents an extra 370 murders in 2005. Distributed over the 562 cities, that's less than an extra murder per city, per year.

More narrative flourishes:

And even those local numbers tell only part of the story. Serious crime is concentrated in poor black and Hispanic neighborhoods, and in certain areas within them. For people who live in the Anacostia area of Washington, in the Nickerson Gardens housing complex in South Los Angeles, and on Magnolia Street in Boston, the citywide statistics have always been meaningless. Their neighborhoods are war zones.

In the District, attacks on tourists on the Mall and on a political activist in Georgetown may grab headlines, but it is the everyday violence in troubled neighborhoods that drives up the body count. Boston has so many street memorials for homicide victims that the city is considering regulating them.

Having visited some of DC's worst neighborhoods, his assessment isn't terribly off, but the idea that this is on a dramatic upswing (the premise of his op-ed) is shaky, and the tendency towards breathless prose doesn't help the analytical case.

Key problems such as crack waned but never really went away. Many rural areas have been ravaged by an exploding methamphetamine epidemic, which we have been unconscionably slow to recognize as a national crisis.

Another "national crisis," reported in countless news exposes and features. But is the meth epidemic quite that bad?

"There is no evidence of an increase in meth use. In fact, it's been flat for a decade or more or even declining slightly," said Craig Reinarman, co-editor of the groundbreaking "Crack in America," which debunked many of the myths surrounding that drug, and currently professor of sociology at the University of California at Santa Cruz. "To be fair, 2003 is the last year for which there is good data available, and this flood of meth stories appears to have really taken off in the last six months or so, so it is possible we are missing something. But most of these recent stories appear to be based on little more than anecdotes from law enforcement or social workers. It may be true that there is a small number of meth users who are getting in serious problems, but it looks like the press is falsely extrapolating to create a trend that is not supported by the aggregate numbers," he told DRCNet.

To be sure, the above excerpt doesn't come from a neutral source and referenced data stops at 2003, but the quote is also from a credentialed academic, and it undermines Kennedy's repetition of the conventional wisdom about the "national crisis" of increasing meth use. Also note Jack Shafer's article in Slate: "Crack Then. Meth Now. What the press didn't learn from the last drug panic."

And after declaring our cities newly-minted war zones analogous to Iraq - where 3,000 civilians were killed in June - Kennedy applies his analytical skills to identifying the root cause:

Beyond this, there is a subtle but worrisome shift at work. We are used to thinking of the many factors that drive crime -- poverty, inequality, demographics, racism, and family and community problems. But to that list we should add the spread of a subculture once found only in the toughest urban areas: the culture of respect.

Sounds good. And by "sounds good," I mean that it's certainly soundbyte worthy: "The culture of respect."

My research in Baltimore, Boston, Minneapolis, Washington and many other cities, along with that of colleagues at the University of California at Irvine and at Michigan State University, shows that in hard-hit neighborhoods, the violence is much less about drugs and money than about girls, vendettas and trivial social frictions. These are often referred to as "disputes" in police reports and in the media. But such violence is not about anger-management problems. The code of the streets has reached a point in which not responding to a slight can destroy a reputation, while violence is a sure way to enhance it. The quick and the dead are not losing their tempers; they are following shared -- and lethal -- social expectations.

Is this assessment correct? It's certainly possible, I have no idea. While anecdotally, I can confirm that a hostile thug quite earnestly threatened to "slit [my] throat" the other day after I beat him in an online video game, I have no idea if this focus group and psychographic research holds up in explaining the 2% shifts upwards in the homicide rate from 2001-2003, followed by the 3.7% decline in '04, followed by a 5% uptick in '05 and a less-than-promising '06.

But Kennedy doesn't know either, though he claims to know. More anecdotal drama follows, buttressed by another root cause: the spread of thug life by popular media:

This thug ethos is spreading. It used to be that one learned how to be a gangster from another gangster. No more. Mass-market glossy magazines promote the thug life. One can learn from listening to rapper 50 Cent, or by watching music videos. And it is big business. When rapper Lil' Kim was convicted of perjury connected to a shooting by her posse, she got her own reality show on Black Entertainment Television, which promoted her intent to go to federal prison with her "mouth shut and head held high." Crips and Bloods have Web pages and profiles on MySpace.

Ah the 21st century thug, savvy yet violent navigator of the technological revolution.

All of this is spreading as well as amplifying the street definition of what it means to have honor. In big cities, the quest for honor reignites existing conflicts; in small ones, it brings big-city behavior and big-city problems. Working recently on Long Island with the Nassau County Police Department, my colleagues and I found Bloods, Crips -- and violence. But the gangs were homegrown, and the violence was almost entirely personal.

Again, true? Who knows. Sounds good to me. And he offers another cause: tough law enforcement:

Tragically, the code of the street -- and the community disorganization and disenfranchisement on which it thrives -- has been helped along by law enforcement. Profligate arrests and incarcerations, many aimed at drugs, have destroyed the village in order to save it. As crime has dropped, zealous enforcement has continued. A staggering 2 million people are now incarcerated in the United States, and about 5 million are on probation and parole. They disproportionately come from -- and return to -- the same neighborhoods. The Justice Policy Institute recently determined that a shocking 52 percent of Baltimore's black men ages 20 to 29 were incarcerated, on probation or on parole; nationally, the lifetime chance of a black man being locked up is one in three.

This enforcement breaks up families; it ruins the prospects of young people who now have little reason to finish school and take entry-level jobs, and of older people who find themselves virtually unemployable; it creates a street culture in which prison is normal and even valued; and it plays directly into community narratives that equate law enforcement and the white community with slaveholders and other historical oppressors. The "stop snitching" culture that recently made headlines has been brewing for decades, reflecting a conviction on the part of many that law enforcement is a racist enemy -- even though staying silent means protecting violent predators.

Two problems with this conclusion:

1. As noted in Freakonomics, "innovative law enforcement methods" were falsely credited with the reduction in violent crime in the 90's; earlier in the article, Kennedy even explicitly noted that he was wrong about this assumption. So you'd think that subjective, fuzzy causality about policing methods might give the very same criminal justice expert pause when trying to explain a recent uptick of 2-5% in homicides, for a period of 4 of the last 5 years. I guess not.

2. Also in Freakonomics, economist Steven Levitt specifically identified tough law enforcement and increased incarceration as one of the pieces of conventional wisdom that was correct in explaining the drop in violent crime. So to the extent that law enforcement can be credited, more police and increased incarceration are the areas with actual positive causality. Quoth Levitt:

The evidence linking increased punishment with lower crime rates is very strong. Harsh prison terms have been shown to act as both deterrent (for the would-be criminal on the street) and prophylactic (for the would-be criminal who is already locked up). Logical as this may sound, some criminologists have fought the logic. A 1977 academic study called "On Behalf of a Moratorium on Prison Construction" noted that crime rates tend to be high when imprisonment rates arehigh, and concluded that crime would fall if imprisonment rates could only be lowered. (Fortunately, jailers did not suddenly turn loose their wards and sit back waiting for crime to fall) As the political scientist John J. DiIulio Jr. later commented, "Apparently, it takes a Ph.D. in criminology to doubt that keeping dangerous criminals incarcerated cuts crime."

Levitt explains that increased enforcement and incarceration started during the 80's accounted for one-third of the drop in crime of the 90's. So not only is Kennedy's assessment based on subjective, fuzzy logic, it's actually counterintuitive to measured historical trends.

And the final section of his piece offers constructive solutions for the problem:

So what do we do?

Above all, get serious.

In this, we agree. And since David Kennedy is a wildly unserious analyst, I didn't bother reading the rest of his hyperbolic op-ed.

Could he be right? Could the proportionally small yet notable uptick in homicides of the past four of five years signal the dawn of domestic war zones? Could the homicides be caused by a violent "culture of respect" promoted in mass entertainment? And has aggressive law enforcement "destroyed the village in order to save it[?]"

In some of these respects, anything is possible. We'll have to see if last year's 5% increase in homicides continues for a few years, and also note whether overall violent crime reverses and starts to trend upwards as well. But I wouldn't feel comfortable putting a great deal of money on his conclusions based on the above presumptions. And given Kennedy's purple prose and tendency to enthusiastically wax alternately sanguine and apocalyptic within the space of 13 months, over inverse annual homicide rate swings of 3.7% and 5% respectively, the only thing that I feel certain about is a basic mistrust of his analytical ability.