A parsi- monious multivariate ARIMA model was created that contains the two variables with the most robust effects on crime rates in the Rosenfeld and Levin (2016) study: the inflation rate (adjusted by median household income) and the imprisonment rate.3 The imprisonment rate is lagged one 3 The inflation data are from the Bureau of Labor Statistics ( ), and the imprisonment dat. [...] The closer the forecasted crime rates are to the observed rates during the validation period, the greater our confidence in the forecasts for 2022 to 2026, when the crime rates are unknown. [...] In general, all of the errors for the property crime rate during the 10-year validation period fall within the 10% tolerance limits, and the mean absolute error during the validation period is just 2.4%. [...] With the exception of the unforecasted increase in violent crime in 2021, the small size of the forecast errors during the validation period inspire confidence in the violent and property crime forecasts for 2022 to 2026. [...] But the last few years serve as a reminder that crime rates are subject to unanticipated jolts that can throw off even the most reliable predictions of the future.4 4 It should be noted that although the aggregate rate of violent crime declined in New York in 2020, the city saw an increase in homicide of unprecedented size, a local instance of the sharp rise in homicides in the nation as a whole.
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- United States of America
