Less cash, less crime

Cash is portable, hard to trace, and universally-accepted, no questions asked.  Which makes it a good thing to steal.  There may be a relationship between the decline in the crime rate and the rise of debit-cards and other electronic means of exchange.  A study suggests this is the case in poor neighborhoods, ever since the welfare system replaced cashable checks with debit cards.

From Christopher Ingraham, To fight crime in your community, stop using cash:

A new study has found that paying welfare benefits via debit card, rather than cash, caused a 10 percent drop in crime.

Researchers have long noted that cash plays a critical role in street crime, due to its liquidity (it’s easy to access and everyone accepts it) and anonymity (it leaves no paper trail). In poorer neighborhoods, public assistance payments used to be a significant source of circulating cash: recipients would cash their assistance checks at the bank, pocketing the money and making them attractive targets for criminals.

But starting in the 1990s that changed, as the Federal government gradually phased out paper welfare checks in favor of electronic debit cards (the Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) program). Along with a team of researchers, Richard Wright of the University of Missouri studied the effects of this change in his home state and found that it was directly responsible for a hefty 10 percent drop in the overall crime rate there. . . .

To what extent can we extrapolate from these findings nationally? Wright and his co-authors tantalizingly note that the widespread drop in crime in the U.S. over the past several decades corresponds to a decline in the proportion of transactions involving cash. While there are a wide variety of explanations for this, the paper notes that “a significant fraction of the decline has yet to be identified empirically.” While a lot more research is needed on this questions, Wright’s paper strongly suggests that less cash = less crime.