Philippine Crime Rates II

I've been thinking about the Philippine crime rate trend from the earlier post and trying to think of ways to explain it. I wonder how much of it is due to reduction in crimes in the city or Metro Manila in particular. The growth rate in the economy seems like a convenient explanation but I don't want to limit it to that effect yet. If that was true crime should have spiked up after the 1997 Asian crisis. I wonder how much of it is due to increasing use of private security services it is said that in Metro Manila alone there are 136,256 private security guards. The business district of Makati alone has 4,500 of these guards. To put this Makati security guards numbers in perspective, there are only 560 policemen in the Makati Police department. Here is my main source for these numbers.