
Crime in America keeps going down, yet the American public refuses to believe it - fogus
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/02/14/imaginary_fiends/?page=1
======
jameskilton
Very simple explanation: the media.

Fewer crimes happen these days yes, but that just means that the media can
cover more of them that _do_ happen, so we are more informed of crime than we
ever have been in the past.

Thus, the news sources end up propagating this false idea that crime is
actually on the rise because they work hard at keeping this news always at the
forefront of people's minds.

~~~
S_A_P
that pretty much sums it up there. It doesnt stop with crime either- weather
reports in my city often have overtones of Armageddon as well...

~~~
akgerber
I think you mean Snowmageddon.

~~~
adamhowell
Or Snowpocalypse. Or Snowtorius B.I.G.

------
masterponomo
In Atlanta, the crime statistics are down because the recently-departed police
chief set up a system where his performance (and that of his underlings, all
the way down) was measured based on the information that made it into the
computer system. Apparently, he has made a career out of installing this
system when he is appointed in a new city. As with defect tracking systems in
many businesses, there is a tendency from the top down to game the system,
redefine terms, and reclassify crime reports as lesser crimes or mere
'incident' reports. When your job and compensation starts to depend on
statistics emitted by a computer, self-preservation leads to dishonesty. The
administration in Atlanta continues to resist the creation of a citizen review
board with actual teeth--one that can do more than sit in review of a few
high-profile incidents and instead focus on seeking independent crime
statistics to really guage the performance of the police department. I don't
know about other cities, but I suspect the use of such crime stats packages is
common in many jurisdictions.

~~~
halo
While your cynicism about official crime statistics may be well placed, there
are ways of measuring crime that are practically impossible to manipulate,
such as crime surveys which ask a random sample of the population if they have
been the victims of crime in the last year. Both the US-based National Crime
Victimization Survey (<http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/>) and the British Crime
Survey (<http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/soti.html>) are of this type, and
they have both shown a consistent downward trend in most types of crime. In
addition, the figures for some classes of crime, such as homicides, can't be
manipulated either, and these have also been decreasing in recent years.

~~~
masterponomo
Public perception of crime is not based on the murder statistics (though of
course the occasional senseless killing during a robbery raises more outrage
than the garden-variety domestic violence murder). Perception of crime in my
neighborhood (Centennial Park/Marietta Artery) is based on the ability to walk
down the street without being accosted by a beggar, or to park your car
without having it broken into, or to walk the sidewalk after dark without fear
of being robbed. I'm in a fairly secure condo building so fear of a break-in
is not that great, but in surrounding neighborhoods of free-standing houses,
break-ins are rampant. Just as you met my statement of reality with more
references to statistics, the police and the city government here continue to
give each other pats on the back as the populace grows ever more wary based on
what we see on the streets out our windows with our own eyes, not based on the
media or the official stats. We don't have a math problem--we have a police
manpower, quality of life, and law enforcement problem.

------
nazgulnarsil
I'm going to get downvoted for this because its fairly controversial and
therefore requires backing up, but I'm at work.

multiculturalism makes people more suspicious and distrustful, regardless of
the actual state of physical safety and security. sucks, but our brain is
wired that way.

<http://www.city-journal.org/html/eon2007-06-25jl.html>

~~~
sp332
Monoculturalism is a form of conservatism. Multiculturalism makes things less
certain. It shouldn't be seen as fear, just less certainty. “In colloquial
language, people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker
down’—that is, to pull in like a turtle.” This is a completely normal response
to uncertainty.

~~~
randallsquared
You seem to be using "uncertainty" so that it is indistinguishable from how
most of us would use "fear".

~~~
sp332
If an investment is uncertain, a conservative person would not make the
investment. The conservative person is therefore not afraid, because they
don't have anything on the line. Fear comes after you invest in something
uncertain, because then you might lose something. So, uncertainty might affect
your choice to invest, but fear only comes after.

------
DannoHung

        Edwards: Why the big secret? People are smart. They can handle it.
        Kay: A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it. Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you'll know tomorrow.

~~~
pixcavator
Here's another one for this list: everybody knows that five hundred years ago,
everybody knew the Earth was flat (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth>).

------
tokenadult
The trend reported in the submitted article is true. That doesn't stop me from
personally knowing various victims of various crimes (which did not receive
mass media coverage). The overall crime rate in the United States is still
high by historical standards, having dropped back to levels of the 1960s,
which were levels much higher than in the preceding decade. The trend line
looks encouraging, but the actual base rate of crime still needs to be reduced
some more.

~~~
rbranson
I don't think you can compare crime now to the anything previous to the 60s.
The advent of ubiquitous telecommunications, security cameras, computerized
record keeping and banking, standard government-issued IDs, DNA evidence, et
al have all significantly changed how we both perceive the level of crime and
track the level of crime.

~~~
jrockway
Not to mention that reading certain books is apparently a crime these days.

------
david927
Oh, it's going down. But the United States is doing this by keeping _everone_
who might commit a crime in jail. And that's expensive.

As the depression deepens, you'll see states start to close down detention
facilities. Add to that a huge unemployment rate among the young and poor, and
you're just asking for fireworks.

------
ErrantX
Once again I recommend the book "Risk: the science and politics of fear". It
outs forwards lots of theories and research related to this.

On a related note I saw the other day that one percent of the us population is
in jail. A huge amount of basic bits and bobs like military gear and paint
(90% of domestic pain production for example) are made by prisoners (some
might say as slave labour!). One in ten black men are in prison. 2 in ten have
been in prison at some point. This numbers gobsnacked me (passed on for
informational purposes only :-))

~~~
jedc
I saw the author speak; he's a smart guy and is tackling a tough subject.
There are a lot of reasons most people (including myself) develop screwed-up
attitudes toward risk. The media is most certainly one, but it also deals with
natural phenomenon in how our brains are wired for survival. (Recency bias,
availability bias, etc.)

~~~
ErrantX
Cool! Where did you see him speak? I've not dug around for any more of his
work. Risk was really eye opening so I probably should!

~~~
jedc
You can see the (hour-long) video of his talk here:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6buOrNLXIgg>

(I was in the audience that day...)

------
mark_l_watson
Another myth: the world is a dangerous place. Seriously, for most people on
earth, the world has steadily become a safer place over the last 50 years. Far
more danger during the "cold war."

Media hype of "orange alerts," "red alerts," etc. is just a clever way to get
people to accept $1.5 trillion/year of military related spending each year (in
the USA).

Sure, crime, terrorism, rogue governments like Israel and Iran, etc. are some
danger to the world population, but I believe that the trend is towards a
safer world.

------
BigZaphod
I know this perception is certainly true in my family. At any major family
gathering it always seems to come up that everything is "so much worse" and
"more dangerous than it used to be." "We used to just leave the doors unlocked
and no one cared - now you can't leave anything unattended or it'll walk off!"
And yet this is based on no evidence at all. If I ask if they've had anything
stolen, the answer is always no; then they justify that result because they
always lock things up! Sigh.

~~~
randallsquared
_If I ask if they've had anything stolen, the answer is always no; then they
justify that result because they always lock things up!_

Maybe that's actually part of it. A culture of suspicion would seem likely to
make crime less likely to be successful, so perhaps worried vigilance is part
of why crime is decreasing.

Edit: Underreporting might explain some of this apparent decrease, too. If you
think there's essentially no hope of recovering what was lost, you might well
not bother reporting a crime, and you're less likely to think that the police
can be effective for you if it seems as though they're ineffective in general.

Last spring, I had my G1 stolen right out of my hands while I was texting on
it, in downtown DC. I didn't even realize it was taken at first; I thought I'd
dropped it because someone bumped me, so it took a few seconds to even look
for the thief, and by that point he was just going around the corner. If I had
reported it, I wouldn't have been able to give a description other than
general skin color, build, and clothing, and 90% of the people around me were
wearing the same jeans-and-red-shirt as the thief (a Capitals game night).
With less than a 1% chance of getting my phone back, and no insurance on it, I
didn't bother to spend the next coupla hours of my life complaining to the
police about it; that would have just made things worse for me.

~~~
palish
Why would anyone bother stealing a cell phone? They're easy to flag as
"stolen" and become useless at that point.

~~~
randallsquared
I assume you can just flash it to a new serial number, but I don't know that
much about it. The T-Mobile folks didn't seem surprised when I said it had
been stolen, and had a procedure to cut off the sim pronto, so it's not too
unusual.

------
j_baker
In fairness, social data is just as tricky as any other kind of data (even if
sociology is a "soft science").

First of all, lower crime rates doesn't necessarily mean that less crime is
happening. It means that less crime is getting _reported_. There is a huge
difference. For instance, you may notice that crime rates in Britain
skyrocketed the same year they passed a handgun ban. As it turns out, they
also switched to a more accurate crime reporting system that same year which
caused the spike.

Secondly, crime rates are difficult to analyze. Saying "crime is going down"
is like saying "sickness is going down". There are lots of different kinds of
crime with lots of different motivations behind each, and those kinds of broad
generalizations are rarely useful.

So while I do feel that the media is playing games with the American public, I
also can't blame the public for not being more educated on crime rates.

------
AnneTheAgile
A reason I am not optimistic about crime in the USA is the continuing
escalation of so-called smaller issues. With crime, "a stitch in time saves
nine." Catching a small incident and having the person change behavior leads
to enormous changes over time.

For an example that many consider trivial, cursing is at an all time high.
Cursing's purpose in life is to convey and share anger: it is not conducive to
high quality, cheerful life. There is research in psychology that shows that
expressing anger leads to more, not less, of it. I actually consider quitting
HackerNews entirely due to the poor quality of auto-removal of cursing in
titles, text, and remarks. I am very repulsed by the ruby community for the
same reason. For exaple, ruby sub, an email client has an homepage that
features cursing. I just feel ick and don't even want to try it any more.

A second glaring example, imho, is vandalism. Nowadays, when I accosted a
vandal in NYC, he gave me the NY Times' justifications for his crime. He said
"it's art!" and "I'm black and I'm angry!" He has absorbed all the anti-
capitalist myths; I am sure he never read Atlas Shrugged! The amount of
property destruction is enormous. That is crime and that is way way up.

In some ways, the world is getting alot better: Ayn Rand's philosophy is being
developed and publicized. Those who uphold her ideas of independence,
rationality, etc, are very civilized. Thus it's a race between her ideas and
those of Kant.

~~~
loupgarou21
With cursing, an increase in the frequency of cursing is not necessarily a bad
thing. These forbidden words only hold power in their taboo; by using them
more frequently and openly, it robs the words of their power.

I frequently hear people swearing without trying to express hate, it has just
become a part of their parlance.

------
flipper
In Freakonomics Steven D. Levitt argued that crime rates in a locality are
linked to abortion laws in the same locality a generation earlier.

Basically, in the US, states that legalized abortions after Roe v Wade 1973
noticed a drop-off in crime starting around 1990, whereas states that did not
legalize abortion did not see a drop. He claimed that changes in police
methods around the same time were not so statistically significant in altering
the crime rate.

------
_delirium
_The Economist_ had a similar story on the perception that crime is up even
though it's considerably down in the UK:
[http://www.economist.com/world/britain/displaystory.cfm?stor...](http://www.economist.com/world/britain/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15452867)

Their two main explanations are:

1\. Increasingly nationalized "local" news means that when rare but gruesome
crimes happen, instead of just the city or county where they happen being
outraged, now the whole country is outraged.

2\. A lot of the decrease in violent crime, for the UK at least, is a decrease
in violent crime by people known to the attacker, like domestic violence.
Crime by strangers is not down nearly as much, and is the kind people mostly
mean when they're worried about crime--- they're worried about some guy on the
street mugging them, or a robber breaking into their house.

------
chuckfouts
One possible cause of lower crime rates in the United States is the ever
increasing size of the prison population.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rat...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rate)

~~~
nfnaaron
Or, crime might be even lower than it is now if we stopped locking up some
carefully chosen portion of convicted criminals.

From the wikpedia article:

"One partial, but significant cause of high incarceration rates is that the
United States locks people up, some for a long time, for non-violent crimes.

...

Within three years of being released, 67% of the ex-prisoners re-offend and
52% are actually re-incarcerated."

I wonder how many of those locked up for some definition of non-violent/minor
crime, or casual drug offense, and who are part of the 67% and 52%, would
never have gone on to "re" offend and be "re" incarcerated if they hadn't been
imprisoned in the first place.

~~~
anamax
You're assuming that the second crime is violent, which is curious given your
assumption that a large fraction of prisons are in for non-violent crimes.

There's also the problem that convictions and sentences understate the crimes
committed by those convicted because of plea bargaining. In other words, the
fact that someone was sentenced for a non-violent crime does not imply that
they didn't commit a violent crime.

And then there's the whole "gateway" theory.

I don't know how all these things work out - I'm just pointing out that the
plausible theories go all directions.

------
mcav
Crime is publicized everywhere, drilled into peoples' heads on TV and in
newspapers. In the public eye, crime continues to be seen as a rampant problem
regardless of its increase or decline.

~~~
techiferous
"Crime is publicized everywhere"

The main culprit is your local news.

------
flogic
A year or two ago, an NYPD officer told us crime was up in the city and that
it just wasn't getting reported. Yet another case of making your metrics.

~~~
petewarden
Almost all murders get reported, even in very screwed up countries. That makes
it a very useful metric for comparisons across different places, and across
time in the same place.

Without additional evidence, that police officer's statement isn't very
helpful or credible.

~~~
hga
No, you'd be surprised at how many of the less obvious ones can get swept
under the rug (and even the obvious, see recent Amy Bishop coverage). This
happens in the U.K. to game the statistics, from what I've read.

~~~
petewarden
I certainly would be surprised. Do you have any references? I recommend
"Understanding crime data: haunted by the dark figure" as a good summary of
the research on this topic.

It's easy to come up with anecdotes of particular unreported murders. The data
shows that these are statistically very rare, almost every victim has a family
who reports them missing even if no body is found.

~~~
flogic
As a completely uneducated layman, I'm skeptical of the link between murder
and other crime. I thought murder more often than not is a crime of passion.

~~~
hga
I'm not sure most of them are "crimes of passion", certainly most victims have
a criminal past in the US. But, yes, it does seem to be not tightly linked to
other violent crimes.

But we focus on it since it's the hardest to sweep under the rug, despite that
happening a lot.

------
JoeAltmaier
Does the rise of the Internet correlate? Our "news" is now just blogs and
rumor - which is by its nature sensational.

~~~
didroe
Broadcast media and print are doing a fine enough job on their own with
sensationalism and scaremongering.

------
graywh
This is just one point of many made in Gregg Easterbrook's _The Progress
Paradox_. It describes ways life continues to get better, but people feel
worse despite it.

------
mattmcknight
I think the perception that crime is worse comes from the vast numbers of
people in prison, which has risen significantly, and continues to rise.

------
icono
Ha...too many crime shows on TV. I was recently home shopping and my realtor
thought she was going to be killed daily.

------
yesimahuman
When someone you know is murdered for no apparent reason, the actual crime
rate really doesn't matter.

~~~
dkarl
So, thanks to Facebook, not to mention our ability to feel "connected" with
someone who has been memorialized ad nauseam on cable news, the number of
people with this excuse is increasing despite the number of random murders
decreasing?

~~~
yesimahuman
Perhaps, although calling it an "excuse" is rather offending depending on who
the person is and your relationship to them. I think anyone would feel upset
if someone they knew _of_ died. Facebook just helps you find out about it
sooner rather than twenty years later.

~~~
dkarl
It's okay if the families and friends of murder victims feel murder as a
visceral reality in their lives. It's even okay if that completely unbalances
their political opinions. If violent crime escalated to the point that such
people were anything other than a small minority, drastic measures would be
appropriate.

However, people have a tremendous appetite to vicariously live the dramas of
others. The more dramatic, the better. The vast majority of the electorate
turn on their televisions every day with an appetite, latent or manifest, to
become emotionally involved, and television producers strive to feed that
appetite. We can't allow that many people the privilege to say "the actual
crime rate doesn't matter." They have a civic responsibility to (do their best
to) choose appropriate policy approaches to violent crime. If everyone excuses
themselves from their civic responsibilities because they were traumatized by
CNN's coverage of Natalee Holloway, then our policies will be designed for a
nonexistent hyperviolent world.

Obviously people should put their relationships in perspective, but they often
prefer not to. If Ryan Seacrest is murdered today, will his millions of
Twitter followers take a deep breath and say, "Well, you know, it's not as if
he was really my friend." Of course not. People find it deeply satisfying to
join in collective grief and outrage. They'll exaggerate their emotional
connection for the sake of amplifying the drama. Nobody wants to be left out.

Of course, no one who is really grieving the loss of a close friend would
react that way, but when they're outnumbered thousands or millions to one by
voyeurs, do their reactions matter anymore?

------
BearOfNH
I have read [no citation available :-( ] the actual crime rate is somewhat
correlated with the number of young men -- say, aged 13-30 -- in the
population. This would explain an increase in the 1960s followed by a decrease
in the 1990s and beyond.

~~~
spamizbad
Possibly but why wasn't there a second spike with the Gen-Y baby-boom (born in
the range of 1980-1999), a much larger group than the original Baby-Boomers?

~~~
dandelany
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Uspop.svg>

The Gen-Y baby-boom is not a larger group than the original Baby-Boomers.
However, there is definitely a noticeable Gen-y bump. I'm guessing that the
most common ages for criminals are in the dip of that curve, maybe 20-24,
which means the downward trend should soon begin to reverse if this
correlation holds true.

edit: just realized that chart is from 2000; you're absolutely right that a
second spike is missing.

------
wendroid
Same in the UK

