7 ms·

There seems to be a fairly huge non-sequitur in the middle of the article: Homicides have fallen, but people say they believe crime has risen in their area, the

by b800h 3y ago

There seems to be a fairly huge non-sequitur in the middle of the article: Homicides have fallen, but people say they believe crime has risen in their area, therefore perception is wrong. It's entirely possible that homicide has fallen back to the pre-Covid level, but pettier crimes are on the increase, and not being recorded due to lighter-touch policing as cited earlier in the article.

onionisafruit 3y ago
Indeed almost all crimes aren’t homicide.
- etempleton 3y ago
  No, but homicides are an important benchmark because there is consistency in what constitutes a homicide and murder is hard to brush under the rug or categorize as a lesser crime. If homicides decrease it is a good indicator of overall safety of a city. With that said, theft seems to be getting worse in many places and that is probably a direct result of lighter sentencing for petty theft.
  - uoaei 3y ago
    The vast majority of homicides happen between people who already know each other, so actually homicide rates say nothing about crime within geographic boundaries so much as crime within existing social groups. Then it stands to reason that reporting on crimes in this or that city is mostly nonsense reporting, it doesn't convey any information that's useful to anyone.
ern 3y ago
In addition to politicians and media who always tend to benefit from a perception of increased crime, social media feeds perceptions of increasing crime rates.
sixothree 3y ago
It’s amazing how many people legitimately believe crime is worse than 20 years ago.
- chaps 3y ago
  A lot of recent perception comes from the U-Line owner publishing fake newspapers: https://chicago.suntimes.com/2022/11/3/23438739/right-wing-newspapers-fake-news-newpapers-dan-proft-richard-uihlein-news-literacy-project https://chicago.suntimes.com/2022/11/3/23438739/right-wing-n...
- onionisafruit 3y ago
  Was 2003 a bad year for crime? …aside from war crimes.
  - hx8 3y ago
    2003 wasn't great in hindsight, but peak homicide rate in the US was closer to 1993.
    - mcpackieh 3y ago
      "Twenty years ago" was the 1980s and I'll never believe otherwise.
- tyingq 3y ago
  Awareness and detail of individual crimes is more available.
- stocknoob 3y ago
  “Crime” is too broad a word. Violent crime? Sure. Porch pirates, car break ins, public intoxication/defecation, graffiti, public disturbances that people notice more, and may not be reported? Feels higher.
karaterobot 3y ago
Here's the part that addresses your point: > The decline goes beyond homicides: Violent crime overall ticked down in 2022 across the country, the FBI numbers showed, returning the U.S. pretty much to the level of 2019, before the COVID-19-era increase. It looks like the original survey was asking about whether there is anywhere near the respondent's home where they'd be afraid walk at night. That sounds to me like it's very much a question about perception rather than statistics. Of course, people rarely base that kind of belief on hard evidence: a single incident that happened to a friend of a friend might be enough to make you say "I'm never walking in that neighborhood at night".
- Kamq 3y ago
  > That sounds to me like it's very much a question about perception rather than statistics. Of course, people rarely base that kind of belief on hard evidence: a single incident that happened to a friend of a friend might be enough to make you say "I'm never walking in that neighborhood at night". Wouldn't the perception track the statistics in the scenario you've lined out? More people being stabbed, for example, results in more friends and friends of friends being unwilling to take a walk in that area. I mean, you can have an outlier, a very popular person who triggers more friends/friends of friends, but on average, it seems like perception wouldn't be the worst way to measure this under the scenario you've laid out.
  - lazyasciiart 3y ago
    No. Perception tracks publicity of incidents - I know some people still warning others off a neighborhood they were mugged in 20 years ago, but they don’t mention how long ago it was when they say it’s dangerous. So for instance when a group of well off people move into a depressed neighborhood, there might be the same number of muggings, but 10 times as much talk about it because these people go to the police and write to the paper about it.
    - Kamq 3y ago
      > I know some people still warning others off a neighborhood they were mugged in 20 years ago, but they don’t mention how long ago it was when they say it’s dangerous. But, like, wouldn't a neighborhood with a lot of muggings be more likely to have more people doing that? > So for instance when a group of well off people move into a depressed neighborhood, there might be the same number of muggings, but 10 times as much talk about it because these people go to the police and write to the paper about it. That seems like a valid explanation for a single neighborhood that just started gentrifying, but seems unlikely to be common enough to disrupt the correlation that I'm talking about globally.
addicted 3y ago
Except this trend has been the case even before the pandemic. As crime was dropping precipitously since the 2000s people continued insisting crime was increasing.
- hx8 3y ago
  This doesn't address the parent comment's entire point. It's possible that the trend of 'lighter policing' leads to less reported crimes but not actually fewer crimes has been going on since the 2000s.
  - Retric 3y ago
    There’s many ways to validate crime statistics. For example insurance claims are linked to the number of property crimes independent of what police report. More broadly violent crime has been falling for literally thousands of years. There’s various short term bumps in the rate, but the general trend is down across all societies. The past was simply vastly more dangerous than we are used to.
    - explaininjs 3y ago
      Only if you make insurance claims. I’ve had many things stolen and I’ve never made any claims. Or filed any reports.
      - vore 3y ago
        Sure, but what matters is if they track the actual crime rate right? If you’ve never made any claims then you’ve never been a significant data point to begin with.
        explaininjs 3y ago
        I fear you’re Goodharting this into oblivion. The only endgame of “people who don’t make claims aren’t significant” is police becoming so inept as to never secure property or arrest thrives (already there), and insurance companies having such massive premium hikes on-incident as to make filing claims net-negative in all but the most egregious cases (approaching there).
paulpauper 3y ago
I am not surprised people think things are getting worse. negative stuff is always going viral on Twitter, stuff like looting videos, shoplifting videos, fight footage, public freakouts, etc. The ubiquity of smart phones and social media means occurrences of unrest that decades ago would have been ignored, are recorded and uploaded to go viral. It's like the 24-7 news cycle but on steroids and magnified. Everyone is now a reporter, and footage is promoted by algos.
raincole 3y ago
The whole thing reads very elitist, if not propaganda. 1. "Dropping at a historic rate" is such a weird thing to brag when it's just falling back to the pre-Covid level. 2. The centrepiece of this article is basically "people's feelings are wrong, the government's numbers are right".
- add-sub-mul-div 3y ago
  > 1. "Dropping at a historic rate" is such a weird thing to brag when it's just falling back to the pre-Covid level. You've mixed up the current level with the rate of decline. The article is pretty clear about it.
  - aeternum 3y ago
    It's easy to have a historic rate of decline if you just had a historic rate of increase.
  - raincole 3y ago
    I'll say it again: "Dropping at a historic rate" is such a weird thing to brag when it's just falling back to the pre-Covid level. I didn't mix up anything. Covid is a very abnormal event, and seeing the numbers go back to pre-Covid quickly after Covid is more or less expected. It's a good thing (if it's true), but not that newsworthy.
    - ncallaway 3y ago
      > but not that newsworthy. It may be expected, but I disagree that it's not newsworthy. If a sharp-rise is newsworthy, then it's also important to inform people of the sharp-drop. Even if it makes sense to expect a sharp-drop after an anomalous sharp-rise, if you only report the sharp-rise then you leave people misinformed about the current situation. I think it's fine to complain about the framing of the article, but I think the fact itself is newsworthy.
      - lostmsu 3y ago
bhk 3y ago
Homicide is not back to 2019 levels. Check out the graphic in this article based on the same report: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/new-fbi-report-shows-us-homicide-rate-finally-decreasing-from-pandemic-peak/ar-AA1iElt9 https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/new-fbi-report-shows-us...
- throwaway102223 3y ago
  any stats on vehicle deaths, or i guess manslaughter?
- lamontcg 3y ago
  That doesn't include the 2023 stats that they're talking about. The problem here is that they're citing this one guy as an authority on unpublished stats for 2023.
01100011 3y ago
In my experience, one's opinion of this centers on one's politics. Usually these things are discussed in the context of large cities in the western US controlled by democrats. This leads to many who are farther on the left claiming rising crime is an illusion and if it exists at all it is caused by police not doing their jobs as payback for calls for reform. This also leads many on the right to clutch pearls and declare that liberal enclaves are dying and failed social experiments in liberalism and weak criminal justice. I'll say that, in the case of Seattle, I don't believe overall stats show the region is less safe than, say, the 90s. The 90s were sort of peak crack cocaine and street gangs. Having lived through that time and remembering the crimewave, I think the issue now is that crime back then was mostly in bad areas and didn't affect most middle or upper class folks. Now, especially after the gentrification and return to downtowns, middle and upper class folks are more exposed to crime. The meth and fentanyl epidemics are also helping to push crime into more suburban areas. With all that said, and hopefully not to ruin my other points, I'll say I am leaning more conservative these days after seeing what has become of western cities(from San Diego to Seattle, I've visited them all fairly regularly over the past few decades). I don't think every problem is fixable via public policy, but damn, we're doing something wrong here.
- _3u10 3y ago
  Exactly, you see this to a more extreme degree in South America. Particularly Rio, Buenos Aires, and Asuncion. Rio is don’t take your phone out if you don’t want it to get stolen. BA is you might get mugged at night. Asuncion is you can forget your phone at a cafe and someone will run after you to give it to you but don’t go to the bad areas or you’ll get killed. Oddly Asuncion is the poorest city of them all, but also by far the most conservative. In Rio the women will rob you, in Asuncion not even the Venezuelans who live on the street will rob you.
- seattle_spring 3y ago
  > after seeing what has become of western cities(from San Diego to Seattle What would you say has become of Seattle?
  - 3y ago
onetimeusename 3y ago
crime was increasing in some places like Chicago[1][2]. Homicides and car jackings started trending upward roughly about a decade ago. note that a trend doesn't need for there to be an annual increase. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Chicago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Chicago [2]: https://data.cityofchicago.org/Public-Safety/Chicago-carjackings-by-year/fbqm-xvt4 https://data.cityofchicago.org/Public-Safety/Chicago-carjack... So I think you have to be specific about where but people in Chicago had a valid claim about the perception of crime increasing. These are major crimes so it's also possible reported major crimes have decreased across the country but are increasing in some areas.
dathinab 3y ago
_perception_ is exactly the problem, because news love reporting about crimes and if there is any crime which feels (emotionally) bad they love to go one and one about it for weeks, similar any short term crime increase trends, but if there is a short term huge decrease or a long term decrease it's at most a footnote in the 3rd page e.g. in Germany you are saver now, then 30 years ago but perception, especially in certain groups, is that crime got way worse (I'm intentionally using a 30 year comparison to avoid any short term up-down's around covid.)
yomly 3y ago
I got shutdown on twitter on this subject once - but I maintain can crime stats go down while crime goes up? As crime rates go up (and police get flooded) do people stop reporting all but the most serious of crimes? I live on a street that sees almost daily crime (smash and grabs from car windows, bike theft, delivery theft). The police usually don't even bother coming to check things out because they're so routine and the police are so busy. So it does feel a bit useless reporting them to the police, and eventually you become a bit numb to it all as crime becomes normalized. Can that then explain why crime perception can be high while crime reports come down?
2-718-281-828 3y ago
i always thought covid was particularly devoid of homicides and other crimes.

by b800h 3y ago

onionisafruit 3y ago

Indeed almost all crimes aren’t homicide.

etempleton 3y ago
No, but homicides are an important benchmark because there is consistency in what constitutes a homicide and murder is hard to brush under the rug or categorize as a lesser crime. If homicides decrease it is a good indicator of overall safety of a city. With that said, theft seems to be getting worse in many places and that is probably a direct result of lighter sentencing for petty theft.
- uoaei 3y ago
  The vast majority of homicides happen between people who already know each other, so actually homicide rates say nothing about crime within geographic boundaries so much as crime within existing social groups. Then it stands to reason that reporting on crimes in this or that city is mostly nonsense reporting, it doesn't convey any information that's useful to anyone.

ern 3y ago

In addition to politicians and media who always tend to benefit from a perception of increased crime, social media feeds perceptions of increasing crime rates.

sixothree 3y ago

It’s amazing how many people legitimately believe crime is worse than 20 years ago.

chaps 3y ago
A lot of recent perception comes from the U-Line owner publishing fake newspapers: https://chicago.suntimes.com/2022/11/3/23438739/right-wing-newspapers-fake-news-newpapers-dan-proft-richard-uihlein-news-literacy-project https://chicago.suntimes.com/2022/11/3/23438739/right-wing-n...
onionisafruit 3y ago
Was 2003 a bad year for crime? …aside from war crimes.
- hx8 3y ago
  2003 wasn't great in hindsight, but peak homicide rate in the US was closer to 1993.
  - mcpackieh 3y ago
    "Twenty years ago" was the 1980s and I'll never believe otherwise.
tyingq 3y ago
Awareness and detail of individual crimes is more available.
stocknoob 3y ago
“Crime” is too broad a word. Violent crime? Sure. Porch pirates, car break ins, public intoxication/defecation, graffiti, public disturbances that people notice more, and may not be reported? Feels higher.

karaterobot 3y ago

Here's the part that addresses your point: > The decline goes beyond homicides: Violent crime overall ticked down in 2022 across the country, the FBI numbers showed, returning the U.S. pretty much to the level of 2019, before the COVID-19-era increase. It looks like the original survey was asking about whether there is anywhere near the respondent's home where they'd be afraid walk at night. That sounds to me like it's very much a question about perception rather than statistics. Of course, people rarely base that kind of belief on hard evidence: a single incident that happened to a friend of a friend might be enough to make you say "I'm never walking in that neighborhood at night".

Kamq 3y ago
> That sounds to me like it's very much a question about perception rather than statistics. Of course, people rarely base that kind of belief on hard evidence: a single incident that happened to a friend of a friend might be enough to make you say "I'm never walking in that neighborhood at night". Wouldn't the perception track the statistics in the scenario you've lined out? More people being stabbed, for example, results in more friends and friends of friends being unwilling to take a walk in that area. I mean, you can have an outlier, a very popular person who triggers more friends/friends of friends, but on average, it seems like perception wouldn't be the worst way to measure this under the scenario you've laid out.
- lazyasciiart 3y ago
  No. Perception tracks publicity of incidents - I know some people still warning others off a neighborhood they were mugged in 20 years ago, but they don’t mention how long ago it was when they say it’s dangerous. So for instance when a group of well off people move into a depressed neighborhood, there might be the same number of muggings, but 10 times as much talk about it because these people go to the police and write to the paper about it.
  - Kamq 3y ago
    > I know some people still warning others off a neighborhood they were mugged in 20 years ago, but they don’t mention how long ago it was when they say it’s dangerous. But, like, wouldn't a neighborhood with a lot of muggings be more likely to have more people doing that? > So for instance when a group of well off people move into a depressed neighborhood, there might be the same number of muggings, but 10 times as much talk about it because these people go to the police and write to the paper about it. That seems like a valid explanation for a single neighborhood that just started gentrifying, but seems unlikely to be common enough to disrupt the correlation that I'm talking about globally.

addicted 3y ago

Except this trend has been the case even before the pandemic. As crime was dropping precipitously since the 2000s people continued insisting crime was increasing.

hx8 3y ago
This doesn't address the parent comment's entire point. It's possible that the trend of 'lighter policing' leads to less reported crimes but not actually fewer crimes has been going on since the 2000s.
- Retric 3y ago
  There’s many ways to validate crime statistics. For example insurance claims are linked to the number of property crimes independent of what police report. More broadly violent crime has been falling for literally thousands of years. There’s various short term bumps in the rate, but the general trend is down across all societies. The past was simply vastly more dangerous than we are used to.
  - explaininjs 3y ago
    Only if you make insurance claims. I’ve had many things stolen and I’ve never made any claims. Or filed any reports.
    - vore 3y ago
      Sure, but what matters is if they track the actual crime rate right? If you’ve never made any claims then you’ve never been a significant data point to begin with.
      - explaininjs 3y ago
        I fear you’re Goodharting this into oblivion. The only endgame of “people who don’t make claims aren’t significant” is police becoming so inept as to never secure property or arrest thrives (already there), and insurance companies having such massive premium hikes on-incident as to make filing claims net-negative in all but the most egregious cases (approaching there).

paulpauper 3y ago

I am not surprised people think things are getting worse. negative stuff is always going viral on Twitter, stuff like looting videos, shoplifting videos, fight footage, public freakouts, etc. The ubiquity of smart phones and social media means occurrences of unrest that decades ago would have been ignored, are recorded and uploaded to go viral. It's like the 24-7 news cycle but on steroids and magnified. Everyone is now a reporter, and footage is promoted by algos.

raincole 3y ago

The whole thing reads very elitist, if not propaganda. 1. "Dropping at a historic rate" is such a weird thing to brag when it's just falling back to the pre-Covid level. 2. The centrepiece of this article is basically "people's feelings are wrong, the government's numbers are right".

add-sub-mul-div 3y ago
> 1. "Dropping at a historic rate" is such a weird thing to brag when it's just falling back to the pre-Covid level. You've mixed up the current level with the rate of decline. The article is pretty clear about it.
- aeternum 3y ago
  It's easy to have a historic rate of decline if you just had a historic rate of increase.
- raincole 3y ago
  I'll say it again: "Dropping at a historic rate" is such a weird thing to brag when it's just falling back to the pre-Covid level. I didn't mix up anything. Covid is a very abnormal event, and seeing the numbers go back to pre-Covid quickly after Covid is more or less expected. It's a good thing (if it's true), but not that newsworthy.
  - ncallaway 3y ago
    > but not that newsworthy. It may be expected, but I disagree that it's not newsworthy. If a sharp-rise is newsworthy, then it's also important to inform people of the sharp-drop. Even if it makes sense to expect a sharp-drop after an anomalous sharp-rise, if you only report the sharp-rise then you leave people misinformed about the current situation. I think it's fine to complain about the framing of the article, but I think the fact itself is newsworthy.
    - lostmsu 3y ago

bhk 3y ago

Homicide is not back to 2019 levels. Check out the graphic in this article based on the same report: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/new-fbi-report-shows-us-homicide-rate-finally-decreasing-from-pandemic-peak/ar-AA1iElt9 https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/new-fbi-report-shows-us...

throwaway102223 3y ago
any stats on vehicle deaths, or i guess manslaughter?
lamontcg 3y ago
That doesn't include the 2023 stats that they're talking about. The problem here is that they're citing this one guy as an authority on unpublished stats for 2023.

01100011 3y ago

In my experience, one's opinion of this centers on one's politics. Usually these things are discussed in the context of large cities in the western US controlled by democrats. This leads to many who are farther on the left claiming rising crime is an illusion and if it exists at all it is caused by police not doing their jobs as payback for calls for reform. This also leads many on the right to clutch pearls and declare that liberal enclaves are dying and failed social experiments in liberalism and weak criminal justice. I'll say that, in the case of Seattle, I don't believe overall stats show the region is less safe than, say, the 90s. The 90s were sort of peak crack cocaine and street gangs. Having lived through that time and remembering the crimewave, I think the issue now is that crime back then was mostly in bad areas and didn't affect most middle or upper class folks. Now, especially after the gentrification and return to downtowns, middle and upper class folks are more exposed to crime. The meth and fentanyl epidemics are also helping to push crime into more suburban areas. With all that said, and hopefully not to ruin my other points, I'll say I am leaning more conservative these days after seeing what has become of western cities(from San Diego to Seattle, I've visited them all fairly regularly over the past few decades). I don't think every problem is fixable via public policy, but damn, we're doing something wrong here.

_3u10 3y ago
Exactly, you see this to a more extreme degree in South America. Particularly Rio, Buenos Aires, and Asuncion. Rio is don’t take your phone out if you don’t want it to get stolen. BA is you might get mugged at night. Asuncion is you can forget your phone at a cafe and someone will run after you to give it to you but don’t go to the bad areas or you’ll get killed. Oddly Asuncion is the poorest city of them all, but also by far the most conservative. In Rio the women will rob you, in Asuncion not even the Venezuelans who live on the street will rob you.
seattle_spring 3y ago
> after seeing what has become of western cities(from San Diego to Seattle What would you say has become of Seattle?
- 3y ago

onetimeusename 3y ago

crime was increasing in some places like Chicago[1][2]. Homicides and car jackings started trending upward roughly about a decade ago. note that a trend doesn't need for there to be an annual increase. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Chicago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Chicago [2]: https://data.cityofchicago.org/Public-Safety/Chicago-carjackings-by-year/fbqm-xvt4 https://data.cityofchicago.org/Public-Safety/Chicago-carjack... So I think you have to be specific about where but people in Chicago had a valid claim about the perception of crime increasing. These are major crimes so it's also possible reported major crimes have decreased across the country but are increasing in some areas.

dathinab 3y ago

_perception_ is exactly the problem, because news love reporting about crimes and if there is any crime which feels (emotionally) bad they love to go one and one about it for weeks, similar any short term crime increase trends, but if there is a short term huge decrease or a long term decrease it's at most a footnote in the 3rd page e.g. in Germany you are saver now, then 30 years ago but perception, especially in certain groups, is that crime got way worse (I'm intentionally using a 30 year comparison to avoid any short term up-down's around covid.)

yomly 3y ago

I got shutdown on twitter on this subject once - but I maintain can crime stats go down while crime goes up? As crime rates go up (and police get flooded) do people stop reporting all but the most serious of crimes? I live on a street that sees almost daily crime (smash and grabs from car windows, bike theft, delivery theft). The police usually don't even bother coming to check things out because they're so routine and the police are so busy. So it does feel a bit useless reporting them to the police, and eventually you become a bit numb to it all as crime becomes normalized. Can that then explain why crime perception can be high while crime reports come down?

2-718-281-828 3y ago

i always thought covid was particularly devoid of homicides and other crimes.