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Crime in America keeps going down, yet the American public refuses to believe it
- wendroid 17y agoSame in the UK
- BigZaphod 17y agoI 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 17y agoIf 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 17y agoWhy would anyone bother stealing a cell phone? They're easy to flag as "stolen" and become useless at that point.
- rdouble 17y agoSome people just enjoy stealing things.
- BigZaphod 17y agoMaybe he was a secret agent on a mission and he needed to call the CIA RIGHT NOW to report some amazing world-saving discovery! By giving up his phone, he could have been SAVING THE WORLD!
- randallsquared 17y agoI 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.
- lionhearted 17y agoI remember having to explain to my grandmother than New York City is incredibly safe and so don't be worried. Her reaction to me working in Manhattan and spending time with my girlfriend in Queens, or worse, going to a party in Harlem - she reacted like I was going off into a warzone. No grandma, New York is a very safe place these days. She's almost 90 and I finally got her to visit NY when I was passing through on my way back from Europe last year. It was near Christmas, so we went to the Rockefeller Center, saw the tree, and saw a Broadway show and she loved it all. She kept being amazed at how little crime there was, like she was expecting robberies and muggings and cars lit on fire and flipped over every other block.
- CWuestefeld 17y agoThis goes much wider than crime. When I was growing up in the '70s I used to ride my bike everywhere. Even at 10 years old I was riding clear across town, with absolutely no supervision. What parent allows their kids to do that today? One of the places I'd ride to during the summer was a nearby river. We'd all go swimming there, jumping off the bridge and such. But who would ever go swimming in some river now, despite the fact that water pollution is far better now than it was 30-35 years ago? Full disclosure: I was hit by cars twice while on my bike. And at the river I once dove off the rope swing head first and let go where the water was only 3-4 feet deep, so I'm darned lucky I didn't break my neck and drown. But I did survive.
- Dove 17y agoA favorite blog I read, Free Range Kids, follows this trend in parenting and attempts to counter it. http://freerangekids.wordpress.com/ http://freerangekids.wordpress.com/ The dangers to children from very mundane sources and activities seem just as exaggerated as the dangers from crime. The trend has been developing for a long time, too. When I look at the sort of stuff my dad got to play with as a kid in the 50's, I'm downright jealous.
- yesimahuman 17y agoWhen someone you know is murdered for no apparent reason, the actual crime rate really doesn't matter.
- mrduncan 17y agoAs the saying goes - When someone you know loses their job, it's a recession. When you lose your job, it's a depression.
- yesimahuman 17y agoIn Milwaukee, someone I indirectly knew was murdered this summer. People in my town have been getting robbed more than ever based on reports from my parents. To me, the crime rate is higher than it was when I was younger, despite reports that it is actually going down over all.
- jff 17y agoWhen you were younger, you didn't know as many people and your parents probably didn't tell you about murders. Anecdotes do not overthrow statistics, as we've heard again and again.
- yesimahuman 17y agoI'm not saying they overthrow statistics, just that real things happen and suddenly statistics don't matter. One crime that hits close to home is more important to you than thousands that don't. And I'm not just talking about murders, I'm talking about simple burglary as well.
- Dilpil 17y agoBut that doesn't really get to the point of the article- why were there fewer real things happening when more people were getting victimized?
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- jameskilton 17y agoVery 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 17y agothat 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 17y agoI think you mean Snowmageddon.
- adamhowell 17y agoOr Snowpocalypse. Or Snowtorius B.I.G.
- jonknee 17y agoAre you in the DC area? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpxiCxO5k0g http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpxiCxO5k0g
- sp332 17y agoEven if the coverage level hasn't changed, people's ability to process "crime levels" has been saturated. Even though the absolute level is decreasing, people still feel that it's just as high as before. Edit: for example, there are 476 hits on Boston.com's news wire for the word "murder" over the past 30 days. That's more than 14/day! http://search.boston.com/local/Search.do?s.sm.query=murder&s.author=&s.si(simplesearchinput).sortBy=-articleprintpublicationdate&docType=&s.collections=newsWire:&date=&s.dateRange=month&s.startDate=&s.endDate= http://search.boston.com/local/Search.do?s.sm.query=murder&#...
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- nazgulnarsil 17y agoI'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 http://www.city-journal.org/html/eon2007-06-25jl.html
- lionhearted 17y agoWow, that article was crazy. I'm incredibly pro-open borders, pro-almost unlimited immigration, pro-cultural mixing, pro-genetic mixing, but I can see how those findings would come about. Got any other relevant links on the topic? Incredibly thought provoking.
- byrneseyeview 17y agoFor about 100,000 years, your ancestors have gotten optimal results by trusting people who looked like them, and distrusting people who didn't. That would be a very tough instinct to change.
- alexmat 17y agoI'm always amazed at how easy it is to fall into this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-so_story http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-so_story Not saying you're wrong, but any studies or evidence to back this up?
- byrneseyeview 17y agoThe implicit association test usually shows that you like the folks you look like. And Putnam's study reveals the same thing, on a large scale. Once you consider the fact that for most of human history, we were part of small tribes of close genetic relatives (so kin altruism was good for our tribe's genes, which we are likely to share), you have an explanation that fits the data and makes sense. If that weren't true, you'd have some data that don't make sense, and an evolutionary hole to fill (how would the non-prejudiced tribes outcompete the prejudiced ones before the invention of trade?).
- mcav 17y agoCrime 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 17y ago"Crime is publicized everywhere" The main culprit is your local news.
- tokenadult 17y agoThe 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 17y agoI 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 17y agoNot to mention that reading certain books is apparently a crime these days.
- Zak 17y agoTrue, but not really on-topic. The article is about perception versus reality in a sociological setting, and what you're saying is "there's still too much crime".
- tokenadult 17y agoMy point is that older people with longer memories can still note that today's crime rate is by no means low, even if younger people (say, people my age or younger) have lived in a United States with declining crime rates for more than a decade. Trends are important, but what base they start from is important as well.
- CWuestefeld 17y agoNot to tell you what you really meant, but... As I read your post, I was thinking that increased connectivity between individuals (I'm now in contact with many people I'd have lost contact with ages ago, thanks to FaceBook etc.), together with the widespread mistake that "anecdote is the singular of data", combine to create a perception that more bad stuff is happening. That is, I'm in contact with many more people now than I could have been a few decades ago: everyone I associate with now, plus many people I've reconnected with via social media. I daresay that connects me with more people than, say, my grandfather was connected with. And if my larger sample hits one crime, then our mental inability to scale creates a false impression that the odd event is happening all around.
- DannoHung 17y agoEdwards: 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 17y agoHere'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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth).
- BearOfNH 17y agoI 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 17y agoPossibly 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 17y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Uspop.svg 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.
- synnik 17y agoBecause they are expending their mischievous energy on reddit and 4chan. I'm joking, but the point is serious -- if youth are the main demographic to commit crimes, and our youth now spend a lot more time indoors/online... wouldn't it make sense that the internet is actually responsible for keeping hoodlums off the streets?
- btilly 17y agoTwo significant changes that reduced the crime rate were the reduction of lead in the environment (lead exposure creates a number of changes in people which increase the odds of criminal behavior) and the widespread availability of abortion (unwanted children are more likely than the general public to become criminals). The second is discussed in Freakinomics and the first was discussed in a follow-up article by the same authors. I've listed them in the order I did because my memory says that reductions in lead are believed to have had a greater impact on crime rates than increased abortions.
- david927 17y agoOh, 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.
- mattmcknight 17y agoI think the perception that crime is worse comes from the vast numbers of people in prison, which has risen significantly, and continues to rise.
- ErrantX 17y agoOnce 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 17y agoI 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 17y agoCool! 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 17y agoYou can see the (hour-long) video of his talk here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6buOrNLXIgg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6buOrNLXIgg (I was in the audience that day...)
- flogic 17y agoA 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 17y agoAlmost 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 17y agoNo, 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 17y agoI 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 17y agoAs 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 17y agoI'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 17y agoDoes the rise of the Internet correlate? Our "news" is now just blogs and rumor - which is by its nature sensational.
- didroe 17y agoBroadcast media and print are doing a fine enough job on their own with sensationalism and scaremongering.
- masterponomo 17y agoIn 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.
- DanielBMarkham 17y agoObligatory Scott Adams cartoon (one of my favorites) http://runningagile.files.wordpress.com/2008/02/dilbert-appraisal2.png http://runningagile.files.wordpress.com/2008/02/dilbert-appr... Systemically measuring things can have the opposite effect than what was desired. EDIT: Fixed link
- stratomorph 17y agoYou may want to get a different link; that one threatens goatse in response to hotlinking. Edit: Praise internets, link is fixed!
- halo 17y agoWhile 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/ http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/) and the British Crime Survey (http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/soti.html 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.
- mark_l_watson 17y agoAnother 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.
- chuckfouts 17y agoOne 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_rate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rat...
- nfnaaron 17y agoOr, 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 17y agoYou'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.
- icono 17y agoHa...too many crime shows on TV. I was recently home shopping and my realtor thought she was going to be killed daily.
- j_baker 17y agoIn 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.
- _delirium 17y agoThe 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?story_id=15452867 http://www.economist.com/world/britain/displaystory.cfm?stor... 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.
- flipper 17y agoIn 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.
- AnneTheAgile 17y agoA 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 17y agoWith 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.
- graywh 17y agoThis 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.