Lead exposure causes crime, economist says

Rudy Giuliani never misses an opportunity to remind people about his track record in fighting crime as mayor of New York City from 1994 to 2001.

"I began with the city that was the crime capital of America," Giuliani, now a candidate for president, recently told Fox's Chris Wallace. "When I left, it was the safest large city in America. I reduced homicides by 67 percent. I reduced overall crime by 57 percent."

While crime did fall dramatically in New York during Giuliani's tenure, a broad range of scientific research has emerged in recent years to suggest the former mayor deserves only part of the credit that he claims. The most compelling information has come from an economist in Fairfax, Va., who has argued in a series of little-noticed papers that the "New York miracle" was caused by local and federal efforts decades earlier to reduce exposure to lead.

The theory offered by the economist, Rick Nevin, is that lead poisoning accounts for much of the variation in violent crime in the United States. It offers a unifying new neurochemical explanation for fluctuations in the crime rate and is based on studies linking exposure to lead in children with violent behavior later in their lives.

What makes Nevin's work persuasive is that he has shown an identical, decades-long association between lead poisoning and crime rates in nine countries.

"It is stunning how strong the association is," Nevin said. "Sixty-five to 90 percent or more of the substantial variation in violent crime in all these countries was explained by lead."

Through much of the 20th century, lead in U.S. paint and gasoline fumes poisoned toddlers as they put contaminated hands in their mouths. The consequences on crime, Nevin found, occurred when poisoning victims became adolescents. Nevin does not say lead is the only factor behind crime, but he says it is the biggest factor.

Giuliani's presidential campaign declined to address Nevin's contention that the former mayor merely was at the right place at the right time. But William Bratton, who served as Giuliani's police commissioner and initiated many of the policing techniques credited with reducing the crime rate, dismissed Nevin's theory as absurd. Bratton and Giuliani instituted harsh measures against quality-of-life offenses, based on the theory that addressing minor offenses would head off more serious crimes.

Other theories

Many other theories have emerged to explain the crime decline. In the 2005 book "Freakonomics," Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner said the legalization of abortion in 1973 had eliminated "unwanted babies" who would have become violent criminals. Other experts credited lengthy prison terms for violent offenders, or demographic changes, socioeconomic factors, and the rise and fall of drug epidemics. New theories emerged as crime rates inched up in recent years.

Most of the theories have been long on intuition and short on evidence. Nevin's data attempt to explain both the decline in crime in the 1990s and also the rise in crime in the 1980s, as well as other fluctuations going back a century. His data from multiple countries, which have different abortion rates, police strategies, demographics and economic conditions, suggest lead is the only explanation that can account for international trends.

Because the countries phased out lead at different points, they provide a rigorous test: In each instance, the violent-crime rate tracks lead-poisoning levels two decades earlier.

"It is startling how much mileage has been given to the theory that abortion in the early 1970s was responsible for the decline in crime" in the 1990s, Nevin said. "But they legalized abortion in Britain and the violent crime in Britain soared in the 1990s. The difference is our gasoline lead levels peaked in the early '70s and started falling in the late '70s, and fell very sharply through the early 1980s and was virtually eliminated by 1986 or '87 .

"In Britain and most of Europe, they did not have meaningful constraints [on leaded gasoline] until the mid-1980s and even early 1990s," he added. "This is the reason you are seeing the crime rate soar in Mexico and Latin America, but [it] has fallen in the United States."

Lead levels plummeted in New York in the early 1970s, driven by federal policies to eliminate lead from gasoline and local policies to reduce lead emissions from municipal incinerators. Between 1970 and 1974, the number of New York children heavily poisoned by lead fell by more than 80 percent, according to data from the New York City Department of Health.

Lead levels in New York have continued to fall. One analysis in the late 1990s found that children in New York had lower lead exposure than children in many other big U.S. cities.

The effect was dramatic. In 1990, 31 New Yorkers out of every 100,000 were murdered. In 2004, the rate was 7 per 100,000 — lower than most big cities. The lead theory would explain why crime fell broadly across the United States in the 1990s, not just in New York.

Impulsivity, aggression

The centerpiece of Nevin's research is a century-long analysis of crime rates and lead-poisoning levels: The United States has had two spikes of lead poisoning, one at the turn of the 20th century, linked to lead in household paint, and after World War II, when the use of leaded gasoline increased sharply. Both times, the violent-crime rate went up and down in concert — with the violent crime peaks coming two decades after the lead-poisoning peaks.

Other evidence has accumulated in recent years that lead is a neurotoxin that causes impulsivity and aggression, but these studies have also drawn little attention. In 2001, sociologist Paul Stretesky and criminologist Michael Lynch showed that U.S. counties with high lead levels had four times the murder rate of counties with low lead levels, after controlling for multiple environmental and socioeconomic factors.

In 2002, Herbert Needleman, a psychiatrist at the University of Pittsburgh, compared lead levels of 194 adolescents arrested in Pittsburgh with lead levels of 146 high-school adolescents: The arrested youths had lead levels that were four times higher.

"Impulsivity means you ignore the consequences of what you do," said Needleman, one of the country's foremost experts on lead poisoning, explaining why Nevin's theory is plausible. Lead decreases the ability to tell yourself, "If I do this, I will go to jail."

Nevin's work has been published mainly in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Research.

Nevin acknowledges that crime rates are rising in some parts of the U.S., after years of decline but says crime is still low overall by historical measures.