Cash, after all, is what burglars and muggers are usually after - that or stuff that can easily be turned into it. Cash is harder to trace than plastic - for law enforcement officials or tax inspectors - and therefore favored by underground entrepreneurs, such as drug dealers and pimps. Junkies who steal to feed their habit need cash because they can't pay for drugs with a credit card. A new working paper makes the case, in the somewhat turgid language of economic research:
"The proposition that flows logically from this model is that cash is a necessary functional component of the etiological cycle that drives many sorts of predatory street crime. If that is so, then any reduction in the amount of cash in circulation should produce concomitant reductions in acquisitive street crimes (e.g., theft) and the secondary offenses committed in response to them (e.g., retaliatory assault)."Or, in the more succinct formulation of the paper's title: "Less Cash, Less Crime."