Television has Caused More Crime

Television may be responsible for doubling our crime rate in the United States, suggests Brandon Centerwall, psychiatrist at the University of Washington, in a recent study reported in the June 1992 Journal of the American Medical Association.

Centerwall analyzed crime statistics both before and after TV was introduced in several communities. Those comparisons cause him to conclude that prolonged exposure to violence on TV has increased the number of murders in the U.S. by 10,000 each year. He sees TV as a "causal factor" in about 70,000 rapes and 700,000 injurious assaults annually.