The New York Times yesterday reported on the emerging Ambulance-Homicide Theory, as to why the murder rate is falling in some places. It seems that the correlation to lower homicides may not have anything to do with policing but rather, how close the attack takes place to a high-tech emergency room.

"for all the theoretical talk of ''broken windows'' and ''zero tolerance'' policing that has dominated the public discourse on crime during the past decade, research published this year suggests that the most significant factor in keeping the homicide rate down is something much more practical: faster ambulances and better care in the emergency room. That, in any case, is the intellectual hand grenade that Anthony Harris, director of the Criminal Justice Program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, has thrown into the polarized debate over crime prevention."

There is a discussion of this going on in the comments section of our post yesterday about the drug war catching minnows instead of big fishes.

Kevin Connors points out this article by libertarian Lew Rockwell. PG (BertramRussell) contributes as well.

The official cite to Anthony Harris' report is:

Murder and Medicine: The Lethality of Criminal Assault, 1960–1999, Homicide Studies, May 2002, Vol. 6, No. 2, pp. 128–166, by Anthony R. Harris, PhD Department of Sociology, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Stephen H. Thomas, MD MPH Division of Emergency Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Gene A. Fisher, PhD Department of Sociology, University of Massachusetts Amherst, and David J. Hirsch, BS Emergency Medical Services, Lawrence Massachusetts.