Lunchtime Must-Read: Kevin Drum: America’s Real Criminal Element: Lead

…but its violent crime rate has dropped 58 percent since its peak. Dallas’ has fallen 70 percent. Newark: 74 percent. Los Angeles: 78 percent…. Howard Mielke… Sammy Zahran… lead and crime… six US cities that had both good crime data and good lead data going back to the ’50s, and they found a good fit in every single one. In fact, Mielke has even studied lead concentrations at the neighborhood level in New Orleans and shared his maps with the local police. ‘When they overlay them with crime maps,’ he told me, ‘they realize they match up.’…

We now have studies at the international level, the national level, the state level, the city level, and even the individual level. Groups of children have been followed from the womb to adulthood, and higher childhood blood lead levels are consistently associated with higher adult arrest rates for violent crimes. All of these studies tell the same story: Gasoline lead is responsible for a good share of the rise and fall of violent crime over the past half century….

The gasoline lead hypothesis helps explain some things we might not have realized even needed explaining…. Murder rates have always been higher in big cities than in towns… big cities have lots of cars in a small area, they also had high densities of atmospheric lead during the postwar era. But as lead levels in gasoline decreased, the differences between big and small cities largely went away. And guess what? The difference in murder rates went away too…”