When Crime Became Unprofitable: The Quiet Revolution in American Safety

Remember when Home Alone felt perfectly plausible? Two bumbling burglars targeting a suburban home wasn't comedy gold—it was Tuesday in 1990s America.

Back then, the Wet Bandits had plenty of company. Chicago logged over 50,000 burglaries that year, translating to 1,800 incidents per 100,000 residents. Nationally, Americans faced a property crime rate exceeding 5,000 incidents per 100,000 people—roughly one crime for every 20 residents. The math was brutal: if you lived in America, someone you knew had probably been robbed, burgled, or had their car stolen.

Today, those numbers read like ancient history. Property crime has fallen 66 percent since 1990, reaching the lowest levels since national data collection began in 1976. The 2023-2024 period saw a historic 9 percent single-year drop—the steepest annual decline on record.

The Transformation Nobody Talks About

While America's violent crime decline has dominated headlines, the property crime revolution happened quietly. Burglary rates have collapsed by more than 80 percent nationwide. Even affluent Winnetka, where the McCallisters lived, saw rates drop 60 percent despite having less room to fall.

This isn't just about better policing or economic prosperity. It represents a fundamental shift in how Americans live, work, and protect themselves—changes so gradual we barely noticed them happening.

In 1990, the average residential burglary cost victims between $2,800 and $3,400 (inflation-adjusted). Total property crime losses reached nearly $40 billion annually. But the human cost was higher: roughly 2,500 people died each year in robberies and burglaries gone wrong, while one in four mugging victims suffered physical injury.

These weren't just statistics—they shaped daily life. People stopped reporting "minor" thefts because nothing would happen anyway. Property crime became background noise, something you planned around like bad weather.

When Stealing Became Harder

The transformation stems from three interconnected revolutions that made crime simultaneously harder, riskier, and less profitable.

The Security Revolution: Modern homes are fortresses compared to their 1990 counterparts. Better locks, reinforced frames, motion-sensor lighting, and controlled building access created multiple barriers. Then came the surveillance mesh—Ring doorbells, building cameras, storefront security systems, and the dreaded Nextdoor app creating informal neighborhood watch networks.

A 2021 research paper directly linked burglary's decline to these security improvements. The study revealed a telling detail: the average age of burglars increased as younger criminals found break-ins too difficult to master.

The Profitability Problem: In 1990, a burglar could quickly convert stolen electronics to cash. Today's most valuable tech—smartphones, tablets, laptops—can be remotely disabled and tracked. Consumer electronics have also become cheaper relative to income, reducing resale value. The wages of crime simply don't pay like they used to.

The Cash Exodus: Americans carry far less physical money than in 1990, both in wallets and at home. For muggers, the expected payoff plummeted while risks increased. One Missouri study found that switching from paper welfare checks to electronic transfers reduced local crime rates. The same principle applies to commercial transactions—credit cards and mobile payments offer thieves nothing to grab.

The New Criminal Landscape

This success story comes with caveats. Crime didn't disappear—it evolved. The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center logged $16.6 billion in reported losses for 2024. Package theft, inconceivable in 1990, now costs Americans an estimated $16 billion annually with 58 million packages stolen.

Modern predation is more virtual and bureaucratic: account takeovers, identity fraud, sophisticated scams targeting the elderly. The classic nightmare of a stranger in your house has been replaced by the slow-burn horror of discovering someone has been living in your financial accounts for months.

The tools that made us safer from burglary also created new vulnerabilities. Ubiquitous surveillance can enable authoritarian overreach. The decline of cash reduces financial privacy and can exclude the unbanked from economic participation. Our smartphone-dependent security systems create single points of failure that sophisticated criminals can exploit.