Crime is widely considered a failure in the social system and therefore is to be addressed from the perspective of the social construct operation and the trends existing there. Hence, along with solving crimes, the goal of specialists is to identify and hijack the risks associated with such movements and prerequisites (Siegel, 2014).
I believe that cultural change is one of the most potent triggers for increasing crime rates. This is mainly because any profound kind of change in society inevitably provokes multiple variables that lead to citizens’ deviant behavior. A surge in crime is always associated with political unrest, wars, protests, or regime change (for example, after the collapse of the USSR). Psychologically, cultural change represents a stressful process for people stimulating responses, including violence and disregard for administrative norms.
Furthermore, the Internet has recently become an essential growing element that fundamentally changes crime structure and raises new ethical questions. Society still tends to ignore or overlook the scale of cybercrime while they pose a severe threat to national, corporate, and personal security. Data storage, privacy issues, and other elements of this problem are just beginning to build the internet reality. For this reason, forensic experts should closely monitor developments and monitor potential risks associated with the Internet.
The top three, in my opinion, are closed by medical technology. While this aspect of forensic science is quite debated, medical errors and negligence are widespread and often lead to technology misuse and fatal patient outcomes. Moreover, the availability of emergency care can dramatically reduce the death rate from violent crime and save the lives of many people. Hence, medical technology is an essential part of the dynamics of crime rates.
Overall, I believe these three issues are the most important ones since they all describe relevant structural phenomena and influence extensive parts of the population. Besides, they can be indeed better controlled than, for example, age structure. In addition, drug use being an accelerator of further crime is already a type of misconduct. Understanding these trends gives a picture of today’s American crime rates and helps solve the identified issues.
Reference
Siegel, L. J. (2014). Explaining trends in crime trends. In Criminology: The Core (5th ed., pp. 45–46). Wadsworth Publishing.