In Memoriam: Richard Rosenfeld

By Joel Wallman, Director of Research

Richard Rosenfeld, the eminent criminologist long associated with the University of Missouri-St. Louis, died on January 8 of this year, some three months after being diagnosed with cancer.

Rick’s stature in the field of criminology and his professional recognitions—presidency of the American Society of Criminology, winner of the Edwin H. Sutherland award for scholarly achievement, regular appointments to Department of Justice and National Science Foundation advisory and research groups—will already be known to most associates of the Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy. And those who had the good fortune to be among his acquaintances will already know that it took only a small dose for anyone who met Rick to want to keep knowing him, to be his friend, colleague, student, neighbor. He was a first-rate human being.

Rick was a master of quantitative analysis. But he was more than a number-cruncher. Read his presidential address, where he invokes Durkheim, Parsons, and Polanyi with the greatest of ease in making an eloquent case for the role of social institutions in the vicissitudes of crime.¹ This was the theme of his and Steve Messner’s seminal Crime and the American Dream. Rick was no mere statistician. He was an intellectual.

His scholarly interests, and resulting contributions, were protean. Social inequality and crime, illicit markets and violence, policing practices, recidivism, and the relationship between economic trends and crime rates were perennial preoccupations. In recent years, he became especially interested in the potential usefulness of crime forecasting models. In these, his retirement years, post-2014, he exceeded the relentless pace of scholarship that he’d maintained during his long teaching career. He became a true titan of industry, publishing fully 40 articles after “retiring.” There are the widely cited crime-trend reports he produced for the Council on Criminal Justice. Multiple crime forecasting reports—local, state, and national— written for The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation. A report, funded by the National Institute of Justice and published posthumously by CNA, on a focused-deterrence policing initiative in St. Louis. A Washington Post editorial he and his wife, Janet Lauritsen, also a highly regarded criminologist, wrote about the troubling discrepancy between the Uniform Crime Report and the National Crime Victimization Survey crime numbers for 2022, published two months before his death. (This was far from the first editorial Rick penned, several of which were in the service of his long crusade for a much timelier release of crime data by the federal government.) Rick was working on the page proofs for his Crime Dynamics—the distillation of a lifetime of work on crime trends—while in the hospital. There is no better measure of his stamina and his commitment to scholarship than the remarkable hour-long interview about his career and the state of the field that he sat for on December 11 of last year.² Synoptic in scope, sage, generous, never less than interesting. And without a hint of the illness he was fighting, a battle he would lose less than a month later.

Rick was a civic-minded scholar, and this went well beyond his opinion essays. His willingness to share his knowledge, coupled with a talent for non-technical explanation, were well-enough known that he became the go-to criminologist for print, television, and media reporters seeking expert commentary on a crime story. (I would occasionally call him, saying I wanted to make sure he was okay because I
hadn’t seen him quoted in the Times for several days.) He consulted, without compensation, for the police department and even the fire department in his beloved St. Louis, the city of his birth and work, and a place he faithfully championed despite its travails.

It was far too soon for us to lose him. Rick was too vibrant a person, too immersed in living, getting too much satisfaction from work and food and music and drinking and talking and from the success of his brilliant sons and from the recent, promising retirement of his brilliant Janet, to go so soon.

Stylish, cool, kind, supportive, funny, driven, clear-thinking, clear-speaking, public-spirited. Richard Rosenfeld. A gift.

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1. Rosenfeld, R. (2011). The big picture: 2010 presidential address to
   the American Society of Criminology. Criminology, 49(1), 1-26.
   https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-9125.2010.00216.x
2. https://thecriminologyacademy.com/episode-89-rosenfeld

Originally published in the Fall 2024 issue of Translational Criminology. Reprinted by permission.