Is it possible the country is so wracked by the recession it just can’t afford violent crime these days? Experts are stumped over the latest figures showing murders down significantly across the country—from New York to Los Angeles, and from San Francisco to Washington, DC. In the District of Columbia, the murder level is on pace to be the lowest since 1964, while in Los Angeles, 137 people have been killed so far in 2009, compared with 197 during the same period last year. Violent crime has been trending downward since 2003 in LA, and like other major metropolitan areas experiencing recent drops, officials really can’t say what the cause is (except for the police, who are happy to take the credit). Some criminologists, though, point to the era of the Great Depression, which experienced lower overall crime than the previous decade of the Roaring Twenties, as another example of a bad economic period that coincided (or caused) a reduction in the worst criminal offenses.