Looks like you're putting the cart before the horse.  Do the research, then come to a conclusion.  Seeking to refute is a media\ideological methodology.

I don't know about any studies directly looking at development in low income communities. At least in the US, development tends to lead newer higher income people to move into a community, so any drop in crime could be due to all the poor people moving out. So your suspicion that new development doesn't bring jobs for the people who need them makes sense.

But there have been lots of studies on a national level (for America) on what factors influence crime rates. The simple answer is: no one knows.

Violent crime in the US went up greatly for a long period of time when the economy was good, then declined by half during a period that included some fairly bad recessions.

Here are some good links
http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2015/02/the-many-causes-of-americas-decline-in-crime/385364/

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2014/11/11/crime_rate_down_respect_for_guns_up_trend_lines_pass_each_other_contradictorily.html

The first article includes this relevant statistic:
"...we found the following factors had some effect on bringing down crime: a growth in income (5 to 10 percent), changes in alcohol consumption (5 to 10 percent), the aging population (0 to 5 percent), and decreased unemployment (0 to 3 percent). Policing also played a role, with increased numbers of police in the 1990s reducing crime (0 to 10 percent) and the introduction of CompStat having an even larger effect (5 to 15 percent)."

Also consider this article

:http://nextcity.org/daily/entry/summer-jobs-for-teens-city-programs-impact

Thank you so much...this is great.

Based on a literal interpretation of the thread title I think you could list occupations prone to criminal activity like hedge fund manager, politician, investment banker, etc.

Food for thought.

^the decline in the sixties is impressive. And the spike since Ronnie, wow....

Yeah, 

There are some interesting questions that arise out of that chart that could be aligned with locations, but it's fast becoming a thesis if not a dissertation.

But I just can't help to think there is truth to the argument. In wide generalizations that I'm a little uncomfortable with (exposing some of the original logic), if you redevelop a given property and price out the residents and reduce "risk" though design and visible constituencies, you will reduce crime- at that location. So the real question is whether it's a matter of reduction or displacement. 

I wonder if the rise in population in addition to the majority of population moving towards urban living conditions could factor into the crime rise. Of course, the problem with this is that there are hundreds of factors that go into this and you can't blame it on any one cause.

To be honest, I would have assumed that prohibition would have caused a higher spike than it seemingly did.

http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h980.html

1- Prohibition made (exclusive) underground markets. It's hard to prosecute the people who are drinking when they are the ones drinking.

2- Look closer at the patterns of urbanization in the US from the 50's to the 70's, it's not just people moving in. While there are a wide number of contributing factors, some interesting patterns emerge, along with policies, byproducts and consequences.

I suspect the spike will correlate closely with the "War on Drugs"

there was an article a long time ago about speeding tickets and accidents by profession

http://money.cnn.com/2003/10/30/pf/autos/bad_drivers/

my memory tells me there was a better article based on the data presented here, but i couldn't find it.  from what i recall, architects get a lot of speeding tickets, and they speed alot.  lawyers also speed a lot, but don't get so many speeding tickets.

moral of the story is, the number of people incarcerated or number of people tried and convicted of crimes is in no way related to the number of criminal acts being committed.  i think there is a tendency for us to assume the two are related because we have an innate tendency to assume things are fair, but these are two completely unrelated and different conversations to have.

what happened after the 80s wasn't a change in crime, it was a change in convictions.

if you think about the people who were making moonshine and the people who were policing them during prohibition, i would think it's obvious why there wasn't a spike in convictions, even though there was a spike in crime.  aside from perhaps eliot ness, the cops were still drinking with everyone else.  they were members of the community and would have known the people involved, so even if the local cops wanted to bust a still, they would just destroy it along with the liquor and tell the people to stop.  the feds sent T-men, but they would have had difficulty knowing who was running what still.  there efforts would have also been focused on destroying the infrastructure for the photo op rather than prosecuting some poor farmer for cooking moonshine.

back then the goal was to build a stronger community.  sometimes they had to throw people in jail to do that, and sometimes they had to hang people to do that.  now it's not so much about a safer community, but rather getting more people circulating through the prison-industrial complex.

@curtkram:

"sometimes they had to throw people in jail to do that, and sometimes they had to hang people to do that."

I trust that the casual tone in these statements is ironic and not matter-of-fact.

this website have good data sets containing not only health stats but also things like violent crime, unemployment, avg income, child poverty etc. (they don't tell you specific sources of employment/unemployemnt like in the OP, though)

http://www.countyhealthrankings.org/

if you know a little excel trickery you can get correlation graphs right out of there.

That is not a chart of crimes but of prison population. Current statistics indicate that crime rates are unrelated to the number of people incarcerated. 

The US has 5% of the world population but 25% of the world's inmates. Somebody is making money on this.