COMMENTARY: Does a Cashless Society Mean Less Crime?

We’re buying more stuff with keystrokes and plastic instead of cash these days. Now comes evidence that our cash-light ways may be foiling crime.

Researchers at the University of Missouri-St. Louis looked at what happened when Missouri switched from handing out welfare checks to depositing welfare on debit cards. Burglary, larceny and assault went down, they found. Robbery may have fallen, too, although there weren’t enough robberies in the sample to draw a firm conclusion.

To understand why, put yourself in the shoes of a crook.

You can swipe the purse of a well-dressed woman downtown. You’ll get a couple of credit or debit cards and a little cash. The typical American carries just $15, according to a Tufts University survey.

The cash is nice, but the credit card is problematic. Credit cards don’t sell for much on the street, said criminologist Richard Wright of UM-St. Louis. Try to use a stolen card in a convenience store, and your picture will be on a video camera. Cards stop working when the victim reports the theft.

On the other hand, you could go to a poor neighborhood and lurk around at a check-cashing shop when a hotel maid shows up with her paycheck. Snatch that purse and you’ll get no plastic, but more real money.

Cash is what the thief wants most. The people he deals with don’t take a credit card. So putting welfare on debit cards makes the recipient a less attractive target.

Crime in the United States has been trending down for a quarter of a century. There are many possible reasons: more police on the streets, smarter policing, putting more criminals in prison, the end of the crack epidemic 20 years ago and demographic shifts.

If digitizing and plasticizing money also lowers crime, that may bode well for the future. Folding money is slowly going out of fashion. Use of debit cards is soaring. “You can use a credit card to buy a Coke, and pay at the parking meter,” Wright noted.

Half a century ago, cash was used in 80 percent of all transactions. Now it’s closer to half, including quarters dropped in the soda machine.

Missouri moved welfare from checks to debit cards in the late 1990s. Criminologist Wright, along with colleagues from UM-St. Louis and elsewhere, studied the result. The change rolled out slowly across the state, allowing researchers to compare crime between counties that had switched to those still using checks, as well as before and after the switch.

Overall, there was a 9.8 percent reduction in crime attributed to the change, the researchers say.

Wright came up with his theory that cash makes crime while studying crime in St. Louis. That meant chatting up local thieves. They told him they prefer cash. “They’re pretty desperate when they commit these crimes,” Wright said. “No one on the streets is using checks or credit cards to buy drugs.”

Crime tends to be concentrated in poor neighborhoods, where welfare recipients live. Less cash meant leaner pickings for burglars and thieves of all sorts.

Wright attributes the drop in assaults to the side effects of property theft: fewer people seeking revenge against thieves, and less cash stoking disputes in the drug business.

So, will our increasingly cashless society become safer from street crime? “It’s certainly suggestive of that,” said Wright, although the study alone doesn’t prove it.

On the other hand, digitizing money enables a new brand of thieves: cybercriminals. Their typical theft makes a street robbery look penny ante.

Successful larceny will require a higher class of crook – less muscle, more brain, and more computer skills and education.

“The rich will steal crime from the poor,” Wright said.