Four Oakland, Calif., police officers shot down and others wounded. An Alabama man goes on a two-town shooting spree, killing 11 people. Seven elderly people and a nurse shot dead at a North Carolina nursing home. And on Sunday, six people, including four kids, died in an apparent murder-suicide in an upscale neighborhood in Santa Clara, Calif.

Although investigations are still pending, many experts are quick to form a link between the deep recession and the sudden spike in mass murders. Criminologists say that such incidents are the result of an increasing number of Americans feel desperate pressure from job losses and other economic hardship. Of course, such connections tend to be difficult to prove.

Still, criminologists do say that certain kinds of violent crimes have risen during specific economic downturns. Some point to the recessions of the early 1980’s and again in the 1990s in which violence committed by disgruntled laid-off employees became commonplace. Many employers and managers began adding extra security to their firms to watch for angry former workers.

One can also point to other countries with high jobless rates and high crime rates and could find a possible connection. In Latin America, for instance, particularly Columbia, murder-kidnappings are very common, with family members of the wealthy being kidnapped and held for huge ransoms. Many poor countries in Africa also have to grapple with frequent acts of violent crime, especially murder and armed robbery. Police departments in some jurisdictions are said to be extremely backlogged in cases because they are so frequent.

Japan could be another example. The bursting of its economic bubble in the late 1980’s was followed almost immediately by a frightening rise in crime. Many laid-off salary-men committed suicide, in some sad cases, taking their families with them. There was also a spike in armed robbery although that country’s overall crime rate remained exceptionally low compared to that of most Western countries. Still, it was enough to make many Japanese people nervous, including one family of four that made headlines in the late-1990’s when they sped through one of the entrances to Yokota Air Base, located about 40 miles west of downtown Tokyo and headquarters of the United States Fifth Air Force, hoping to hitch a ride on a U.S.-bound cargo plane because they wanted to escape Japan’s rising crime.  

Many other Asian countries that suffered during the Asian economic crash of the late-1990’s also saw an immediate surge in crime, particularly South Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia and Indonesia. In fact, in Indonesia, which always had a frighteningly huge gap between the rich and the poor, the crime rate spiraled out of control so bad that many countries ordered the evacuation of their citizens there.