AFTER HE BEAT an 80-year-old grandmother, took a mother with a stroller hostage, and robbed 11 London banks in broad daylight, Michael Wheatley was finally nabbed by British police late last month. Dubbed the Skull Cracker for his habit of pistol-whipping victims, Wheatley had transfixed the London tabloid press with a series of dramatic, violent crimes. Scared Londoners, however, had more to worry about than just the Skull Cracker: In April alone, one gang used a battering ram to steal $14,500 of merchandise from a jewelry store near the city's commercial center, another took to ramming cars into storefronts, and teenage thugs robbed pedestrians of their mobile phones all over the city. Last year, London saw more serious assaults, armed robberies, and car thefts than New York; 2002 could see London's murder rate exceed the Big Apple's.

The same pattern can be seen throughout Europe--indeed, in much of the developed world. Crime has recently hit record highs in Paris, Madrid, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Toronto, and a host of other major cities. In a 2001 study, the British Home Office (the equivalent of the U.S. Department of Justice) found violent and property crime increased in the late 1990s in every wealthy country except the United States. American property crime rates have been lower than those in Britain, Canada, and France since the early 1990s, and violent crime rates throughout the E.U., Australia, and Canada have recently begun to equal and even surpass those in the United States. Even Sweden, once the epitome of cosmopolitan socialist prosperity, now has a crime victimization rate 20 percent higher than the United States.

Americans, on the other hand, have become much safer. Preliminary 2001 crime statistics from the FBI show America's tenth consecutive year of declines in crime. While our homicide rate is still substantially higher than most in Europe, it has sunk to levels unseen here since the early 1960s. And overall crime rates in this country are now 40 percent below the all-time highs of the early 1970s. In 1973, nearly 60 percent of American households fell victim to property crimes. In 2000 (the most recent data available), only about 20 percent did. Among the economically powerful democracies in the Group of Seven, only the Japanese now have a lower victimization rate than the United States.

So why have America's streets become safer even as crime has exploded in Europe? Many commonly cited explanations don't hold water: America's falling population of males in their teens and early 20s helped reduce crime in the early 1990s, but crime continued to fall even as youth populations began to swell later in the decade. While the American Enterprise Institute's John Lott has shown that greater gun ownership reduces crime, this deterrent effect can't explain more than a small part of America's recent success. It's now easier to carry concealed weapons in some parts of the country, but Lott acknowledges that gun ownership levels are about the same as they were when crime hit its all-time highs in America 30 years ago. Third-world immigration, the bugbear of the European right, may drive crime rates up, but violence and theft have also spiked in countries that let in few immigrants.
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