Is American Violence a Crime Problem?

By long-standing habit, Americans use the terms "crime" and "violence" interchangeably.When we express concern about urban conditions, we commonly talk about "the crime problem" or "the violence problem" as if they were the same thing.When drive-by shootings create newspaper headlines, we demand that our elected officials do something about crime.As a matter of strict definition, the equation of crime and violence is incorrect.Criminal violence is the intentional and unjustified infliction or threatened infliction of physical injury to a human being.'Crime is a much broader category, referring to all violations of the criminal law.The question we consider in these pages is whether there is actual harm in confusing crime and violence when making policy-whether it is an error to address violence in the United States as a crime problem.The standard of judgment we propose for this question is a pragmatic one.We are not concerned here with definitional niceties; we are concerned only with the sorts of mistakes that waste material resources and opportunities to save lives and alleviate public fears.We will demonstrate in these pages that regarding