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I think you're burying the lead here. An important fact is that Americans also think that crime, and specifically violent crime, are on the rise. This is contr

I think you're burying the lead here. An important fact is that Americans also think that crime, and specifically violent crime, are on the rise. This is contrary to actual data. So the question are "does news distort our views?" and "does news make us feel more unsafe than we actually are?". Certainly the answer to both is "yes" https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/08/29/the-link-between-local-news-coverage-and-americans-perceptions-of-crime/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/08/29/the-link-... https://news.gallup.com/poll/652763/smaller-majorities-say-crime-serious-increasing.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/652763/smaller-majorities-say-c...

quantummagic 1y ago
People who don't watch the news are uninformed. People who watch the news are misinformed. The news lies. In many subtle and not so subtle ways; due to incompetence, bias, misguided good intentions, politics, money, and evil conspiracies.
- somenameforme 1y ago
  Another typical way of expressing it: Dog bites man isn't news, man bites dog is. Literally. [1] [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9h_5Zgms5EY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9h_5Zgms5EY
eclipticplane 1y ago
There is massive under-reporting of violent crime across many decades. How can we evaluate that? Just in my household alone, we've been victim of 4 assault+ attacks in the past 5 years. Two resulted in arrests, zero resulted in charges. Is that normalized in data from 20 years ago?
- 0xDEAFBEAD 1y ago
  Yeah I think it would be good to cross-check all government statistics against polls from groups such as Gallup, to get a sense of what's being reported.
  - Braxton1980 1y ago
    Since statistics are gathered by cities and aggregated at the state then federal level it protects against a small number of bad actors from manipulating the data. Finally the same reasons that cause underreporting today existed in the past. 1. Not reporting low level crimes feeling as it has no point. 2. Criminals not reporting when they are the victims of a crime out of fear. 3. When the victim takes the matter of into their own hands I'll even suggest that due to racism and lack of accountability in the past it's possible more criminal complaints were ignored compared to today.
  - godelski 1y ago
    Got you covered! They use FBI data for reported crimes as well as BJS data which interviews people and ask them if they have been the victim of a crime. It's probably worth taking a minute or two to read their short explanation as I think it is not what people are assuming. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45588459 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45588459
- Braxton1980 1y ago
  >There is massive under-reporting of violent crime across many decades. How can we evaluate that? If you don't know how to evaluate that how can you claim there's a massive under reporting of violent crime? The last crime I was the victim of was having my car broken into around 2003. I didn't report it but I was angry. Something bad happened to me through no fault of my own and nothing I could have done reasonably would have prevented it. There are emotions involved and I'm sure for a while I felt as though crime was everywhere and I would be the victim again.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - socalgal2 1y ago
    I've had my car broken into 6 times (reported 3), my car itself stolen once, 5 bikes stolen (reported 3). > Something bad happened to me through no fault of my own and nothing I could have done reasonably would have prevented it. It shouldn't happen period. Effectively, at least in the USA, we've given up on this kind of crime and just expect it. Most people take the POV it is their fault (they left something visible in the car). That's BS. You are not responsible for the thief's actions. The thief is. Period! There are places in the world where this mostly doesn't happen at all. (Japan, Singapore). You should be able to leave stuff in your car and not have it be stolen. We, as a society, have given up on even trying to enforce this in any way shape or form AFAICT. My belief is, most of this type of crime is by just a few people repeating the same crime. Honeypots would catch those and lower the numbers by 90-95% IMO.
    - Braxton1980 1y ago
      Honeypots would only work if the criminals are sentenced to long prison terms which is costly. I asked chatgpt about why low level crime is low in Japan and it gave three interesting reasons. 1. Collective culture - basically focusing the harmony of society over the self. Not doing things that would harm others. 2. Fear of shame by others if caught 3. Communities are against anti social behavior Assume these are correct for low levels crimes. Does this sound like America? We are a country where the freedom to be an asshole has high value. Individualism and personal freedom are over community. Think about loud cars, it provides personal pleasure at the expense of others. I also think about how much HOAs are hated (though some support them obviously because they exist*). There's also a movement against empathy, another reason you might not want to cause harm to others.
- godelski 1y ago
  > Just in my household alone, we've been victim of 4 assault+ attacks in the past 5 years. Two resulted in arrests, zero resulted in charges. First, I'm sorry that that has happened to you. Personally I feel that that is unacceptable. You have every right to be upset and I'm personally not a fan of the police. No doubt they have a tough job, but they actually do need to do their jobs and actually focus on more impactful crimes. But that is orthogonal to this discussion. Second, you have reported those, so they have been recorded and accounted for in this data. If you click a few of the links on the Pew site you'll land here[0] | The FBI publishes annual data[1] on crimes that have been reported to law enforcement, but not crimes that haven’t been reported. And in the next paragraph | BJS, for its part, tracks crime by fielding a large annual survey of Americans ages 12 and older[2] and asking them whether they were the victim of certain types of crime in the past six months. One advantage of this approach is that it captures both reported and unreported crimes. So they are comparing two different sources which measure in two different ways. They are quite clear that this data isn't perfect, but at the end of the day, how can it be? We have to do the best with what we have available, right? But I would say that using both of these shows that due diligence is being done. [0] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/24/what-the-data-says-about-crime-in-the-us/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/24/what-the-... [1] https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/explorer/crime/crime-trend https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/explorer/crim... [2] https://bjs.ojp.gov/data-collection/ncvs https://bjs.ojp.gov/data-collection/ncvs [Side note]: In [0] you will also notice that they mention that the FBI changed the definition of rape in 2013. The former definition was limited to women, specifically vaginal penetration, and "forcible". In 2013 this expanded to include vaginal and anal, remove sex, and removes "forcible". Also to note that the MeToo movement started in 2006 and gained full attention in 2017. There's a commonly held belief that the rate of reporting substantially increased due to the change of definition and the greater public attention given to the subject. Believe that or not, but this is context needed to evaluate that data.
- matwood 1y ago
  I’m sorry your family have been a victims of violent crime. I’ve never been a victim of a violent crime, though I did have my car broken into over 20 years ago. My anecdote would suggest there’s no crime, but we know that’s not true and why we have statistics.
  - suddenlybananas 1y ago
    You're not listening to what he is claiming, which is that crimes are going underreported and so the statistics are not accurate.
    - nyanmatt 1y ago
      The claim is anecdotal and thus insufficient for statistical analysis, as expressed by the previous response. What did they miss exactly?
      - suddenlybananas 1y ago
        The claim that statistics are flawed is not something you can respond to with by saying that the statistics say otherwise.
        irishcule 1y ago
        But the claim specifically, was that the statistics are flawed NOW with an implication that they were not flawed before. Not sure you can do much with that in a discussion/argument when there is no proof of that provided other than a personal anecdote. Edit: Actually maybe I misread it, they are saying its always been flawed. But still the general point of the thread still holds I think.
    - testdelacc1 1y ago
      People always claim statistics are inaccurate when the statistics contradict their subjective experience or sincerely held belief. One proxy for crime statistics is homicide. Any other stat can be juked, but homicide cannot because bodies stink. To someone who was insisting to me that the UK crime rate has increased over time, I pointed out that it was possible, but unlikely. Homicide is at a multi decade low in absolute numbers, and much lower in per capita numbers. That’s likely to be correlated with violent crime. So in the case of the UK both homicide and violent crime have followed a gentle downwards trend line, and we can trust the first line completely. Therefore, the second is likely to be true. Did it convince the guy I explained this to? No it did not. “You don’t live in a rough area like I do”. Ok then.
- stuffn 1y ago
  While it's a tragedy that's happened to you the FBI posts yearly crime statistics. The numbers are verifiably true. Violent crime is at it's lowest point in decades. Even war zones like Memphis are on downtrend (though still terrible relative to other places in the US). The news absolutely lies to keep people afraid because fear sells. Think about how afraid people were of kidnappings in the 90s, or drugs in halloween candy, etc. All overplayed, and in the case of halloween candy, a complete fabrication. It's gotten much worse with social media. Whereas you'd normally only get your hit of "the world is on fire" once or twice a day at your favorite news station now you can get it 24/7/365.
nradov 1y ago
You're assuming causality there which hasn't been proven. "When the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right." -Jeff Bezos https://lexfridman.com/jeff-bezos-transcript/#chapter6_amazon https://lexfridman.com/jeff-bezos-transcript/#chapter6_amazo...
- rsynnott 1y ago
  ... Just because Jeff Bezos said something stupid, I wouldn't read too much into that.
- Braxton1980 1y ago
  >"When the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right." What is the context or background for this statement? It's completely insane to think something like this
  - nradov 1y ago
    The context is right there in the link. Listen to the whole interview, you might learn something. It's pretty wild for a random HN user to label one of the top 10 most successful technology leaders of our time as "insane", lol.
    - brendoelfrendo 1y ago
      Jeff Bezos is a morally bankrupt oligarch; that does not, depending on who you ask, make him insane, but it does mean that I will interpret what he says through the lens of a sociopath who is used to hearing from sycophants.
    - godelski 1y ago
      > It's pretty wild for a random HN user to label one of the top 10 most successful technology leaders of our time as "insane" It should probably happen more often. Here, let me go. I think it is insane that Elon Musk took so much ketamine that he kept peeing his pants and then kept telling people about it. I think it is insane he's been promising that FSD is <2 years away for the past decade.
nobodywillobsrv 1y ago
What is important is crime rate given exposure. Not crime rate. Mitigation matters. This misreasoning or misrepresentation is at the heart of a lot of nonsense to do with interventions and effects. See COVID and what not. It is very hard to measure crime rate given exposure. And finally rates do not matter much. What matters is interventions and policy in reaction to each observation. People feel that each murder not resulting in back propagation through policy intervention space to update the weights to prevent it from happening. Instead only narrative space weights are being updated. The idea that rare events below some threshold on a per capita per year basis must be ignored is pushed around too and people can see through it. How much has spend on crime cameras gone up over the last few decades and how do you factory that into crime data? How have people moved? We don't have contact rates for people and criminals so it's all very hard to estimate. Just because many basic people simply can not study rare events without getting upset doesn't mean we should not do so and try to drive the rate of bad things happening to zero. It's particularly bad in the UK where rates are actually up yet the media seems to always pick some dimension where arrests or crimes are down and push that. People no longer trust the data process let alone the reasoning behind most media reports. They might not be able to describe it but they can feel it. I get irritated about this as it's the same contact process and susceptibility problem in epidemiology and yet some how politicized the other way.
- godelski 1y ago
  > What is important is crime rate given exposure We have data on that too! There's tons of sites that show this to varying degrees, here's a few[0,1,2]. Crime is actually fairly localized. This is either entirely surprising or unsurprising to people. That the difference can be just a few blocks. There's quite a bit of research on the topic, and crime is even the main topic of Steve Levitt, that guy from Freakanomics. But I'm not sure this is really all that related to the topics. Considering that crime is localized and that victims follow a power distribution (a few people are victims to many crimes while a lot of people are victims to few/no crimes) then that only ends up highlighting the distortion even more. > What matters is interventions and policy in reaction to each observation This I agree with the most. Certainly we haven't been doing a great job at this and I think it is a more effective discussion to have. Though this too can get heated and myopic very fast. People love to assume that there are clear and simple solutions but do not take the time to recognize that if they were so simple they probably would be used. If they are simple it is even simple for the incompetent. But I think a lot of people are unwilling to admit that topics like crime are exceptionally complicated. I'm not sure why, it is a problem we've been unable to solve across thousands of years of human civilization. Clearly it isn't an easy problem to solve. [0] https://crimegrade.org/crime-map/ https://crimegrade.org/crime-map/ [1] https://maps.crimeometer.com/ https://maps.crimeometer.com/ [2] https://www.adt.com/crime https://www.adt.com/crime
coldtea 1y ago
>An important fact is that Americans also think that crime, and specifically violent crime, are on the rise. This is contrary to actual data Is it contrary to actual data, or is crime that doesn't get to the point of homicide (so violent attacks, burglaries, shoplifting, petty crime, etc) conveniently under reported, and people have seen nothing come out of reporting it (if police ever comes to begin with) and has given up even trying to get anything done about it?
muddi900 1y ago
Burying the lede* Sorry, just a pet peeve.

quantummagic 1y ago

People who don't watch the news are uninformed. People who watch the news are misinformed. The news lies. In many subtle and not so subtle ways; due to incompetence, bias, misguided good intentions, politics, money, and evil conspiracies.

somenameforme 1y ago
Another typical way of expressing it: Dog bites man isn't news, man bites dog is. Literally. [1] [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9h_5Zgms5EY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9h_5Zgms5EY

eclipticplane 1y ago

There is massive under-reporting of violent crime across many decades. How can we evaluate that? Just in my household alone, we've been victim of 4 assault+ attacks in the past 5 years. Two resulted in arrests, zero resulted in charges. Is that normalized in data from 20 years ago?

0xDEAFBEAD 1y ago
Yeah I think it would be good to cross-check all government statistics against polls from groups such as Gallup, to get a sense of what's being reported.
- Braxton1980 1y ago
  Since statistics are gathered by cities and aggregated at the state then federal level it protects against a small number of bad actors from manipulating the data. Finally the same reasons that cause underreporting today existed in the past. 1. Not reporting low level crimes feeling as it has no point. 2. Criminals not reporting when they are the victims of a crime out of fear. 3. When the victim takes the matter of into their own hands I'll even suggest that due to racism and lack of accountability in the past it's possible more criminal complaints were ignored compared to today.
- godelski 1y ago
  Got you covered! They use FBI data for reported crimes as well as BJS data which interviews people and ask them if they have been the victim of a crime. It's probably worth taking a minute or two to read their short explanation as I think it is not what people are assuming. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45588459 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45588459
Braxton1980 1y ago
>There is massive under-reporting of violent crime across many decades. How can we evaluate that? If you don't know how to evaluate that how can you claim there's a massive under reporting of violent crime? The last crime I was the victim of was having my car broken into around 2003. I didn't report it but I was angry. Something bad happened to me through no fault of my own and nothing I could have done reasonably would have prevented it. There are emotions involved and I'm sure for a while I felt as though crime was everywhere and I would be the victim again.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- socalgal2 1y ago
  I've had my car broken into 6 times (reported 3), my car itself stolen once, 5 bikes stolen (reported 3). > Something bad happened to me through no fault of my own and nothing I could have done reasonably would have prevented it. It shouldn't happen period. Effectively, at least in the USA, we've given up on this kind of crime and just expect it. Most people take the POV it is their fault (they left something visible in the car). That's BS. You are not responsible for the thief's actions. The thief is. Period! There are places in the world where this mostly doesn't happen at all. (Japan, Singapore). You should be able to leave stuff in your car and not have it be stolen. We, as a society, have given up on even trying to enforce this in any way shape or form AFAICT. My belief is, most of this type of crime is by just a few people repeating the same crime. Honeypots would catch those and lower the numbers by 90-95% IMO.
  - Braxton1980 1y ago
    Honeypots would only work if the criminals are sentenced to long prison terms which is costly. I asked chatgpt about why low level crime is low in Japan and it gave three interesting reasons. 1. Collective culture - basically focusing the harmony of society over the self. Not doing things that would harm others. 2. Fear of shame by others if caught 3. Communities are against anti social behavior Assume these are correct for low levels crimes. Does this sound like America? We are a country where the freedom to be an asshole has high value. Individualism and personal freedom are over community. Think about loud cars, it provides personal pleasure at the expense of others. I also think about how much HOAs are hated (though some support them obviously because they exist*). There's also a movement against empathy, another reason you might not want to cause harm to others.
godelski 1y ago
> Just in my household alone, we've been victim of 4 assault+ attacks in the past 5 years. Two resulted in arrests, zero resulted in charges. First, I'm sorry that that has happened to you. Personally I feel that that is unacceptable. You have every right to be upset and I'm personally not a fan of the police. No doubt they have a tough job, but they actually do need to do their jobs and actually focus on more impactful crimes. But that is orthogonal to this discussion. Second, you have reported those, so they have been recorded and accounted for in this data. If you click a few of the links on the Pew site you'll land here[0] | The FBI publishes annual data[1] on crimes that have been reported to law enforcement, but not crimes that haven’t been reported. And in the next paragraph | BJS, for its part, tracks crime by fielding a large annual survey of Americans ages 12 and older[2] and asking them whether they were the victim of certain types of crime in the past six months. One advantage of this approach is that it captures both reported and unreported crimes. So they are comparing two different sources which measure in two different ways. They are quite clear that this data isn't perfect, but at the end of the day, how can it be? We have to do the best with what we have available, right? But I would say that using both of these shows that due diligence is being done. [0] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/24/what-the-data-says-about-crime-in-the-us/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/24/what-the-... [1] https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/explorer/crime/crime-trend https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/explorer/crim... [2] https://bjs.ojp.gov/data-collection/ncvs https://bjs.ojp.gov/data-collection/ncvs [Side note]: In [0] you will also notice that they mention that the FBI changed the definition of rape in 2013. The former definition was limited to women, specifically vaginal penetration, and "forcible". In 2013 this expanded to include vaginal and anal, remove sex, and removes "forcible". Also to note that the MeToo movement started in 2006 and gained full attention in 2017. There's a commonly held belief that the rate of reporting substantially increased due to the change of definition and the greater public attention given to the subject. Believe that or not, but this is context needed to evaluate that data.
matwood 1y ago
I’m sorry your family have been a victims of violent crime. I’ve never been a victim of a violent crime, though I did have my car broken into over 20 years ago. My anecdote would suggest there’s no crime, but we know that’s not true and why we have statistics.
- suddenlybananas 1y ago
  You're not listening to what he is claiming, which is that crimes are going underreported and so the statistics are not accurate.
  - nyanmatt 1y ago
    The claim is anecdotal and thus insufficient for statistical analysis, as expressed by the previous response. What did they miss exactly?
    - suddenlybananas 1y ago
      The claim that statistics are flawed is not something you can respond to with by saying that the statistics say otherwise.
      - irishcule 1y ago
        But the claim specifically, was that the statistics are flawed NOW with an implication that they were not flawed before. Not sure you can do much with that in a discussion/argument when there is no proof of that provided other than a personal anecdote. Edit: Actually maybe I misread it, they are saying its always been flawed. But still the general point of the thread still holds I think.
  - testdelacc1 1y ago
    People always claim statistics are inaccurate when the statistics contradict their subjective experience or sincerely held belief. One proxy for crime statistics is homicide. Any other stat can be juked, but homicide cannot because bodies stink. To someone who was insisting to me that the UK crime rate has increased over time, I pointed out that it was possible, but unlikely. Homicide is at a multi decade low in absolute numbers, and much lower in per capita numbers. That’s likely to be correlated with violent crime. So in the case of the UK both homicide and violent crime have followed a gentle downwards trend line, and we can trust the first line completely. Therefore, the second is likely to be true. Did it convince the guy I explained this to? No it did not. “You don’t live in a rough area like I do”. Ok then.
stuffn 1y ago
While it's a tragedy that's happened to you the FBI posts yearly crime statistics. The numbers are verifiably true. Violent crime is at it's lowest point in decades. Even war zones like Memphis are on downtrend (though still terrible relative to other places in the US). The news absolutely lies to keep people afraid because fear sells. Think about how afraid people were of kidnappings in the 90s, or drugs in halloween candy, etc. All overplayed, and in the case of halloween candy, a complete fabrication. It's gotten much worse with social media. Whereas you'd normally only get your hit of "the world is on fire" once or twice a day at your favorite news station now you can get it 24/7/365.

nradov 1y ago

You're assuming causality there which hasn't been proven. "When the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right." -Jeff Bezos https://lexfridman.com/jeff-bezos-transcript/#chapter6_amazon https://lexfridman.com/jeff-bezos-transcript/#chapter6_amazo...

rsynnott 1y ago
... Just because Jeff Bezos said something stupid, I wouldn't read too much into that.
Braxton1980 1y ago
>"When the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right." What is the context or background for this statement? It's completely insane to think something like this
- nradov 1y ago
  The context is right there in the link. Listen to the whole interview, you might learn something. It's pretty wild for a random HN user to label one of the top 10 most successful technology leaders of our time as "insane", lol.
  - brendoelfrendo 1y ago
    Jeff Bezos is a morally bankrupt oligarch; that does not, depending on who you ask, make him insane, but it does mean that I will interpret what he says through the lens of a sociopath who is used to hearing from sycophants.
  - godelski 1y ago
    > It's pretty wild for a random HN user to label one of the top 10 most successful technology leaders of our time as "insane" It should probably happen more often. Here, let me go. I think it is insane that Elon Musk took so much ketamine that he kept peeing his pants and then kept telling people about it. I think it is insane he's been promising that FSD is <2 years away for the past decade.

nobodywillobsrv 1y ago

What is important is crime rate given exposure. Not crime rate. Mitigation matters. This misreasoning or misrepresentation is at the heart of a lot of nonsense to do with interventions and effects. See COVID and what not. It is very hard to measure crime rate given exposure. And finally rates do not matter much. What matters is interventions and policy in reaction to each observation. People feel that each murder not resulting in back propagation through policy intervention space to update the weights to prevent it from happening. Instead only narrative space weights are being updated. The idea that rare events below some threshold on a per capita per year basis must be ignored is pushed around too and people can see through it. How much has spend on crime cameras gone up over the last few decades and how do you factory that into crime data? How have people moved? We don't have contact rates for people and criminals so it's all very hard to estimate. Just because many basic people simply can not study rare events without getting upset doesn't mean we should not do so and try to drive the rate of bad things happening to zero. It's particularly bad in the UK where rates are actually up yet the media seems to always pick some dimension where arrests or crimes are down and push that. People no longer trust the data process let alone the reasoning behind most media reports. They might not be able to describe it but they can feel it. I get irritated about this as it's the same contact process and susceptibility problem in epidemiology and yet some how politicized the other way.

godelski 1y ago
> What is important is crime rate given exposure We have data on that too! There's tons of sites that show this to varying degrees, here's a few[0,1,2]. Crime is actually fairly localized. This is either entirely surprising or unsurprising to people. That the difference can be just a few blocks. There's quite a bit of research on the topic, and crime is even the main topic of Steve Levitt, that guy from Freakanomics. But I'm not sure this is really all that related to the topics. Considering that crime is localized and that victims follow a power distribution (a few people are victims to many crimes while a lot of people are victims to few/no crimes) then that only ends up highlighting the distortion even more. > What matters is interventions and policy in reaction to each observation This I agree with the most. Certainly we haven't been doing a great job at this and I think it is a more effective discussion to have. Though this too can get heated and myopic very fast. People love to assume that there are clear and simple solutions but do not take the time to recognize that if they were so simple they probably would be used. If they are simple it is even simple for the incompetent. But I think a lot of people are unwilling to admit that topics like crime are exceptionally complicated. I'm not sure why, it is a problem we've been unable to solve across thousands of years of human civilization. Clearly it isn't an easy problem to solve. [0] https://crimegrade.org/crime-map/ https://crimegrade.org/crime-map/ [1] https://maps.crimeometer.com/ https://maps.crimeometer.com/ [2] https://www.adt.com/crime https://www.adt.com/crime

coldtea 1y ago

>An important fact is that Americans also think that crime, and specifically violent crime, are on the rise. This is contrary to actual data Is it contrary to actual data, or is crime that doesn't get to the point of homicide (so violent attacks, burglaries, shoplifting, petty crime, etc) conveniently under reported, and people have seen nothing come out of reporting it (if police ever comes to begin with) and has given up even trying to get anything done about it?

muddi900 1y ago

Burying the lede* Sorry, just a pet peeve.