The Connection Between Violence and Lead Paint Remediation in Washington, DC
What is the connection between violence and lead paint remediation in Washington, DC?
A strongly correlated hypothesis, and pretty alarming, as it turns out. I heard a man named Adrian Raine, author of The Anatomy of Violence: The Biological Roots of Crime, talking to Terry Gross on NPR's Fresh Air the other day. Raine, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, spells it out this way:
"In the 1990s violence begins to come down, as it's been doing. What's partly explaining that? The reduction in lead in the environment. In fact, if you map environmental lead levels over time like that and map it onto the change in violence over time, lead can explain 91 percent of those changes."
A neuro-criminologist, he studies the brains of violent offenders. Their elevated lead levels are associated with risk factors such as aggressiveness, impulsivity, and lower IQ scores. Building blocks of the classic criminal profile.
The 2010 violent crime rate in Washington, DC dropped 58 percent from its peak in the early 1990s, compared to New York City at a dramatic 75 percent dive. Diverse methods of lead remediation were pursued. For example, the mayors in some major metropolitan areas developed and enforced strict lead paint remediation programs for public housing. The aggressive lead remediation efforts paid off.
The empirical data from the District of Columbia validates the hypothesis and celebrates the success of the past twenty years of lead remediation. As Kevin Drum of Mother Jones writes in his seminal article from this past January:
"Where lead concentrations declined quickly, crime declined quickly. Where it declined slowly, crime declined slowly. The data even holds true at the neighborhood level."
In each and every neighborhood throughout the District there is more lead, and more lead paint remediation must be done. Until we are all safe from the danger of poisonous lead in our environment, lead remediation must continue.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), there is positively "no demonstrated safe concentration of lead in blood." Lead paint remediation in Washington, DC, by a licensed, certified professional, is always the safest way to remove toxic lead from your home.
