Sorting Crime SOC 3333 · Crime Lab · Midwestern State University

Notice what did the work. In every case the physical act was similar, a person died at another person's hands, and the legal category moved anyway. What moved it was a mental state you cannot observe directly and have to infer from circumstances: planning, provocation, recklessness, the presence of another felony. That is why homicide law is really a typology of minds rather than a typology of acts.

And notice the felony murder rung. It is the one rule on this ladder that convicts people of murder without any intent to kill, and in many states it reaches accomplices who were never in the room. Supporters argue it deters people from committing dangerous felonies at all. Critics argue it punishes an outcome rather than a choice, and several states have narrowed it in recent years. You do not have to resolve that. You do have to notice that a category, not a fact, is doing the deciding.

The rule underneath all six. Ask one question first: was a person confronted with force or the threat of it? If yes, you are in robbery, and it is filed with violent crime no matter what got taken. If no, and someone entered a structure unlawfully, you are in burglary, and it is filed with property crime no matter how frightening it was. If neither, you are usually in larceny-theft, the largest crime category in the country and the one nobody talks about.

Why a vocabulary drill is not a vocabulary drill. These words decide which national number an event lands in. Two nearly identical nights, one where the residents were away and one where they were home and confronted, split into two different families of crime and two different public conversations. When you read that violent crime rose in a city, some of that movement is a change in what happened, and some of it is a change in which box events fell into.

What actually happened

A design decision met a social network. Certain Kia models built from 2011 to 2021 and Hyundai models from 2016 to 2021 were sold in the United States without engine immobilizers, an anti-theft device standard on most other vehicles. That vulnerability sat there quietly for years. In July 2022 a video demonstrating how to start those cars with a USB connector spread on social media, and by that autumn the method had spread nationwide. Los Angeles recorded an 85 percent increase in thefts of Kia and Hyundai vehicles in 2022 compared with 2021. Chicago thefts of those makes rose more than ninefold. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration attributes eight deaths to the trend.

Then the vulnerability was patched. Hyundai began releasing a free anti-theft software update in February 2023 and finished rolling it out to eligible vehicles that June. Motor vehicle theft fell an estimated 18.6 percent in 2024, and the insurance industry counted the largest annual drop in stolen vehicles in forty years. Thefts of the affected Hyundai and Kia models fell by roughly a third in a single year.

Read this carefully before you use it. The timing lines up and the mechanism is plausible, but the software patch was not the only thing happening. Pandemic-era disruptions were unwinding, parts supply was recovering, and nearly every crime category was falling at the same time. The honest claim is that a specific, cheap change in the physical world coincided with a sharp reversal in one specific offense while other offenses fell for their own reasons. Chapter 2 taught you that coincidence in time is association, not proof of cause.

Why this belongs in a chapter about typologies. Motor vehicle theft is filed under property crime, and property crime is supposed to be boring background. For four years it was the most interesting number in American criminology, and the explanation had nothing to do with a new kind of offender, a new kind of poverty, or a new moral climate. It had to do with which cars could be started with a USB cable. Chapter 14 will call this opportunity, and this is your first serious encounter with the idea that crime can be designed out of a situation rather than argued out of a person.

More than one in five drug arrests was for possessing marijuana, in a country where most states have legalized it in some form and roughly two thirds of the public supports legalizing it, which you saw in the Week 1 tool. The same act is a licensed retail purchase in one state and an arrest in another. Nothing about the substance changes at the state line. What changes is the filing system.

Now the measurement trap, and it is the important part. Because no victim reports these offenses, an arrest count for drugs measures police activity as much as it measures behavior. If a department assigns more officers to drug enforcement, drug crime rises in the data. If it reassigns them, drug crime falls. Neither number tells you whether more people used drugs. Compare that with homicide, where the offense is nearly impossible to hide. Two rows in the same federal table, two completely different relationships to reality.

A century of manufactured and unmanufactured crime

The San Francisco opium ordinance of 1875, the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914, national alcohol prohibition in 1920, the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937, and the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 each created crime by statute. Alcohol prohibition was then repealed, and marijuana is being unmade as a crime state by state right now. Chapter 3 has a name for the people who drive these campaigns in either direction: moral entrepreneurs. Take the Chapter 1 question with you. Does this history look more like a society converging on shared values, which is the consensus view, or like particular groups writing their interests into law, which is the conflict view? The strongest answer names specific evidence for one and admits what the other explains better.