What was to be law a-biting

Over the last two decades there has been a dramatic decrease in violent crime in the United States.  It has fallen by around 38% since 1992.  Our crime rates have increased during every recession in our history for which we have those statistics, until this recent one, when they continued to fall.  A variety of theories have been posited. 

One notes that cars have become more difficult to steal, citing that instances of grand theft auto have decreased dramatically over the years and historically car theft has been the first major crime of career criminals.  With cars being harder to steal fewer individuals get wrapped up into lives of crime.

A study from a few years ago noted that rates of play and time spent per week with video games had risen dramatically during the recession among the demographic that historically accounted for the rise in crime.  They hypothesized that the video games kept the would-be-hooligans in doors and away from other people's bodies and property.

Many politicians and police officials cite the adoption of Compstat meetings, where "Every seven weeks bureau commanders are grilled by a senior panel, often including the police chief himself, on the whys and wherefores of crime in their jurisdictions. They are expected to have an on-the-spot grasp of the statistics: if there has been a spike in burglaries from vehicles, the captain’s interrogators will want to know what is being done about it. There is no hiding from the numbers: data-laden documents are distributed before the meeting, and overhead map projections pinpoint the sites of individual incidents in pitiless detail."

I posit my own theory: we have all seen the coverage on the rise in obesity cited as a growing epidemic and a grievous challenge to our current state and costs of health care.  But what if our collective growing guts are actually making us safer? 

If our potential criminals are overweight how far do we really think they are going to be able to run once they've committed their crimes?  How long can you lay low in that abandoned factory if you just have to get to Taco Bell every night?  How are you going to follow that wealthy looking couple into the alley if you can't even fit in the alley?

I'm just saying, when I see a group of teenagers whose guts are  sagging rather than their jeans, I feel safer.  When I'm walking down the street at night and I hear fat footsteps behind me, I feel the warm sense of security that comes with knowing that whether he's the attacker or the attacker is behind him, when the time comes, I'm the one who is getting away.