10 ms·

Perceptions haven't caught up to decline in crime

104 points by jwmerrill 12y ago

jmspring 12y ago
The wonderful thing about broad statistics, a decline in one area can mask increases in others. Here in Santa Cruz (city, not sure about county) lots of crime categories are up across the board. It is pretty darn noticeable.
- mikeleeorg 12y ago
  I don't know how accurate this data is, but I looked around and it seems to match the numbers that other sites listed: http://www.city-data.com/crime/crime-Santa-Cruz-California.html http://www.city-data.com/crime/crime-Santa-Cruz-California.h... It doesn't show any major trends upwards (or downwards) in the crime rate for Santa Cruz. Are there other sources of data on which you are referring? I ask because it looks like you are being downvoted (I didn't downvote you), perhaps because your comment didn't come across like one with data behind it.
  - jmspring 12y ago
    The site shows particular numbers, but having lived here 24+ years, the statistics don't reflect reality. The problem is, "petty theft" doesn't get written up, in most cases if it is under $1000 in loss, the police will not take a report. Bike theft? Well, good luck with that - if Paul Graham was to witness you jacking a $5k bike off of my car and he called the cops and the bike wasn't registered, the cops will not do anything. Thief tools on you and you are "checked out" by the cops, unless there is an outstanding warrant, you are let go. There is a big local issue with actually "punishing" any petty crime. I saw the stats, but the reality is way out of whack with them mainly due to cops/courts/DAs not really enforcing things. Crimes related to drug use -- heroin, meth, bath salts -- generally don't even get into the system. Take them to jail, they are out in a couple of hours max. If you want specifics, I am happy to provide.
- throwaway344 12y ago
  Is there a source that you have on that? I typically use city-data for that sort of thing, and their page doesn't tell the same story. http://www.city-data.com/crime/crime-Santa-Cruz-California.html http://www.city-data.com/crime/crime-Santa-Cruz-California.h... While theft and arson are up, rape and assault are down.
- thrownaway2424 12y ago
  Even if crime is up in SC, it's almost guaranteed that some locale will have rising crime even in a nation of falling crime. It's just a stochastic process where the system boundaries used for reporting crime are more or less randomly determined. I'd be more surprised to hear that there was no such city in America with rising crime.
clarkmoody 12y ago
> It’s an unfortunate fact that media reporting on individual crimes yields a relentlessly dismal drumbeat of downbeat news. But even as each reported crime yields a story that is terrifying enough to shape our perceptions, the truth is that none of them tells us much about the broader trends. Far better to ignore the anecdotes and focus instead on the big picture, and the hard data tells us: There’s been a remarkable decline in crime. But then the media isn't really about giving us perspective, is it?
- spingsprong 12y ago
  No, it really isn't. It's about getting viewers, selling newspapers, and getting clicks. And the best way to achieve that is by using strong emotion, usually negative. Fear, hatred, disgust, anger. I'm not sure how a democracy is supposed to work, when the people voting are being given bad information on such a massive scale. There are so many important areas when what people believe and what is true are miles apart.
  - arethuza 12y ago
    "The best way to achieve that is by using strong emotion, usually negative. Fear, hatred, disgust, anger." Take those topics and add a heavy dose of celebrity trivia and you've described the UK Daily Mail perfectly.
ryangittins 12y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultivation_theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultivation_theory
- Terr_ 12y ago
  I guess it depends to what extent you think TV drives culture versus reflects it. It is kind of amusing to look at certain old movies and see how much less-believable they've become, particularly the ones that implied urban crime was going to get much worse before getting better (if ever.) Ex: Robocop, Judge Dredd, Escape from New York, the introductory portion of Demolition Man...
xexers 12y ago
The same thing is happening with world poverty. Most people think poverty is getting worse, but the opposite is true http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_and_ola_rosling_how_not_to_be_ignorant_about_the_world http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_and_ola_rosling_how_not_to_be_...
- ekianjo 12y ago
  That's what happens when people keep talking about "growing inequalities" instead of focusing on the fact that everyone is actually getting richer with time (and obviously people who already have a lot of capital grow richer faster). There's no zero-sum game at work.
  - eru 12y ago
    > (and obviously people who already have a lot of capital grow richer faster) That's not so obvious, and not trivially true.
    - ekianjo 12y ago
      > That's not so obvious, and not trivially true. Well if you have 1 million dollar and you don't grow your capital faster than someone who has 100 dollars in the bank, you are doing something deeply wrong with your investments. When you have lots of capital you have access to investment opportunities which simply do not exist below a certain level, too. So I'm not sure where the "not trivially true" is coming from.
      - eru 12y ago
        First, we have to decide whether we are going to measure absolute differences or proportions. If we go for proportions, which makes sense since utility of money is roughly logarithmic, it is not at all clear that you can grow 1 million dollar faster than 100 dollar. If we go for absolute differences, than most of the time the millionair will be ahead. But in the recent financial crisis lots of rich people lost lots of wealth (at least on paper), while poor people can only lose so much in an absolute sense.
teuobk 12y ago
Still lacking is consensus on why violent crime has declined. Depending on who you ask, reasons cited include: - Mass incarceration (usually credited with about 25% of the crime decline) - More gun control (e.g., the 1994-2004 assault weapons ban) - Less gun control (e.g., the rise of "shall-issue" concealed carry permits) - Cultural change - Banning of lead in automotive fuel [Nevin 1999] Perhaps all of these mattered; perhaps none did. We don't really know.
- spacehome 12y ago
  Add legalization of abortion to that list.
  - damon_c 12y ago
    Here is a citation to support this: http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/ResponseToFooteGoetz2006.pdf http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/ResponseToFoot...
  - vaadu 12y ago
    Is it just abortion or an increased use of conception prevention methods and morning after drugs?
  - dfc 12y ago
    The abortion explanation has been repeated so frequently that many people have accepted this explanation without digging further into the details. This is one of many explanations that Steven Pinker discusses in his book "Better Angels of our Nature." I am not sure it is as clear cut as you imagine: (I apologize for the lengthy excerpt) When I told people I was writing a book on the historical decline of violence, I was repeatedly informed that the phenomenon had already been solved. Rates of violence have come down, they explained to me, because after abortion was legalized by the 1973 Roe v. Wade U.S. Supreme Court decision, the unwanted children who would ordinarily have grown up to be criminals were not born in the first place, because their begrudging or unfit mothers had had abortions instead. I first heard of this theory in 2001 when it was proposed by the economists John Donohue and Steven Levitt, but it seemed too cute to be true.147 Any hypothesis that comes out of left field to explain a massive social trend with a single overlooked event will almost certainly turn out to be wrong, even if it has some data supporting it at the time. But Levitt, together with the journalist Stephen Dubner, popularized the theory in their bestseller Freakonomics , and now a large proportion of the public believes that crime went down in the 1990s because women aborted their crime-fated fetuses in the 1970s. To be fair, Levitt went on to argue that Roe v. Wade was just one of four causes of the crime decline, and he has presented sophisticated correlational statistics in support of the connection. For example, he showed that the handful of states that legalized abortion before 1973 were the first to see their crime rates go down.148 But these statistics compare the two ends of a long, hypothetical, and tenuous causal chain—the availability of legal abortion as the first link and the decline in crime two decades later as the last—and ignore all the links in between. The links include the assumptions that legal abortion causes fewer unwanted children, that unwanted children are more likely to become criminals, and that the first abortion-culled generation was the one spearheading the 1990s crime decline. But there are other explanations for the overall correlation (for example, that the large liberal states that first legalized abortion were also the first states to see the rise and fall of the crack epidemic), and the intermediate links have turned out to be fragile or nonexistent.149 To begin with, the freakonomics theory assumes that women were just as likely to have conceived unwanted children before and after 1973, and that the only difference was whether the children were born. But once abortion was legalized, couples may have treated it as a backup method of birth control and may have engaged in more unprotected sex. If the women conceived more unwanted children in the first place, the option of aborting more of them could leave the proportion of unwanted children the same. In fact, the proportion of unwanted children could even have increased if women were emboldened by the abortion option to have more unprotected sex in the heat of the moment, but then procrastinated or had second thoughts once they were pregnant. That may help explain why in the years since 1973 the proportion of children born to women in the most vulnerable categories—poor, single, teenage, and African American—did not decrease, as the freakonomics theory would predict. It increased, and by a lot.150 What about differences among individual women within a crime-prone population? Here the freakonomics theory would seem to get things backwards. Among women who are accidentally pregnant and unprepared to raise a child, the ones who terminate their pregnancies are likely to be forward-thinking, realistic, and disciplined, whereas the ones who carry the child to term are more likely to be fatalistic, disorganized, or immaturely focused on the thought of a cute baby rather than an unruly adolescent. Several studies have borne this out.151 Young pregnant women who opt for abortions get better grades, are less likely to be on welfare, and are more likely to finish school than their counterparts who have miscarriages or carry their pregnancies to term. The availability of abortion thus may have led to a generation that is more prone to crime because it weeded out just the children who, whether through genes or environment, were most likely to exercise maturity and self-control. Also, the freakonomists’ theory about the psychological causes of crime comes right out of “Gee, Officer Krupke,” when a gang member says of his parents, “They didn’t wanna have me, but somehow I was had. Leapin’ lizards! That’s why I’m so bad!” And it is about as plausible. Though unwanted children may grow up to commit more crimes, it is more likely that women in crime-prone environments have more unwanted children than that unwantedness causes criminal behavior directly. In studies that pit the effects of parenting against the effects of the children’s peer environment, holding genes constant, the peer environment almost always wins.152 Finally, if easy abortion after 1973 sculpted a more crime-averse generation, the crime decline should have begun with the youngest group and then crept up the age brackets as they got older. The sixteen-year-olds of 1993, for example (who were born in 1977, when abortions were in full swing), should have committed fewer crimes than the sixteen-year-olds of 1983 (who were born in 1967, when abortion was illegal). By similar logic, the twenty-two-year-olds of 1993 should have remained violent, because they were born in pre-Roe 1971. Only in the late 1990s, when the first post-Roe generation reached their twenties, should the twenty-something age bracket have become less violent. In fact, the opposite happened. When the first post-Roe generation came of age in the late 1980s and early 1990s, they did not tug the homicide statistics downward; they indulged in an unprecedented spree of mayhem. The crime decline began when the older cohorts, born well before Roe, laid down their guns and knives, and from them the lower homicide rates trickled down the age scale.153
ianbicking 12y ago
Even though I wish it were true, I'm not sure the decline in crime really indicates greater safety. For instance, one major contribution to the decrease in the murder rate is that people survive gunshot wounds much better than they used to. In terms of the human cost of violence that's actually great, but it's not exactly safety. And of course people have become much more safety conscious now, we drive safer cars, we walk around less, we don't let our kids out unattended, etc. All those things actually do avoid crime, and so reduce the amount of crime, but they don't increase safety. Which is to say: our tolerance for risk has gone down, and behavior has changed because of that, but that doesn't (and rationally shouldn't!) affect our concern about crime. And perceptions are really about the concern about crime (something that actually affects the person being surveyed), not the belief in what crime exists (which only abstractly affects someone) – and it is not irrational that the concern remains steady or goes up even as actual crime rates go down. It may not be good or healthy that the concern remains steady, but it's not irrational.
- alexbecker 12y ago
  Re your first point: every other category of violent crime has fallen as well.
- lstamour 12y ago
  I wondered if population growth also accounts for some of this, though by rough math, the US population has grown by 25% in the last 20 years... and this assumes that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes.
- mikeyouse 12y ago
  This isn't remotely true. The total violent crime rate has decreased by ~50% in the last 20 years. The rate of "Nonfatal Firearm Victimizations" has fallen by ~75% from it's 1990's peak: Overall: http://i.imgur.com/EpZQTo5.jpg http://i.imgur.com/EpZQTo5.jpg By Race: http://i.imgur.com/h7rQVf2.jpg http://i.imgur.com/h7rQVf2.jpg (From this PDF: http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/fv9311.pdf http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/fv9311.pdf)
  - 12y ago
lexcorvus 12y ago
Although I rarely see it considered, one factor that may contribute to a decline in crime rates is flight. When people flee crime-ridden areas, crime rates should go down, but mainly as a side-effect of a worrisome trend. Might this be part of the explanation for the drop in crime? It seems plausible, but I've never seen a careful evaluation of the hypothesis.
- Crito 12y ago
  Without bothering to actually look at the numbers, I suspect you are wrong. Flight was a big thing in the 50's through 80's (although it has continued in a few notable locations (Detroit, etc)). The 90s and 00's are best characterized as a reversal of flight though. Cities like NYC were rejuvenated, young successful people are once again moving into major cities.
georgemcbay 12y ago
Not only haven't they "caught up" but the 24-hour news cycle seems to have made many people (perhaps most people) in the US believe that the crime rates have gone up significantly. I've quit trying to correct people about this (because it is apparently fruitless) on places like Facebook where friends and family will make off-handed claims about how bad the crime is these days compared to "the good old days" (where the "good old days" is circa the late 70s to the early 90s relative to these people's ages). All of your fancy data is no match for people's emotional response perceptions.
- rodgerd 12y ago
  > Not only haven't they "caught up" but the 24-hour news cycle seems to have made many people (perhaps most people) in the US believe that the crime rates have gone up significantly. There's far too much money to be made and too much gain for some political parties to do anything other than pretend it's the end days of the crimpocalypse.
- baddox 12y ago
  I'd like to see it compared with news viewership/readership from various sources. Do people who watch TV news overestimate crime more than those who read news online? How does education about current events affect the estimates? Though I have no data, I'm skeptical that the 24-hour news cycle is the primary factor. I would guess that people always tend to overestimate the crime rate, as a far fundamental bias, similar to how then-modern technology is always ruining society [0], or "kids these days" are always the worst generation ever to grace the planet. The article doesn't say whether people have gotten less accurate over time with their crime rate estimates. [0] http://xkcd.com/1227/ http://xkcd.com/1227/
- tedunangst 12y ago
  An observation hardly unique to crime stats. The 24 hour internet is happy to convince you that the police have never been more brutal, your food has never been more poisoned, etc.
fiatmoney 12y ago
Sure, if you compare to the tail end of the crack wars. Compare to 1950 or 1900 or 1980 or... What does this prove exactly? The perception of "safety" is also not only a function of "crimes per capita". "Blocks safe for a woman to walk through alone at night" or "total victimization rate" make just about as much sense. "Obviousness of safe / unsafe areas" is also a good one - if you have to have local knowledge of what is a "good neighbourhood" or not in order to avoid being victimized, obviously non-locals will develop a perception of the area as unsafe. Wow, from the downvotes people seem really invested in particular choices of time horizon & measures of safety. Who knew?
- seanflyon 12y ago
  Your safety is a measure of how likely you are to be attacked, which is fundamentally a per capita measurement. If there are twice as many people and 10% more attacks, that means that the average person is less likely to be attacked.
  - fiatmoney 12y ago
    No. Crimes per capita can obviously be concentrated in a smaller segment of the population (for instance, those that live in high crime areas). Half the population twice as frequently, or vice versa, looks the same in aggregate but not in perception. And geographic concerns do matter. "I must live in this expensive area to avoid being mugged" drives a perception of unsafety even if you are not being mugged.
- anigbrowl 12y ago
  You're partly right. The 1950s were particularly safe and crime is somewhat higher now than it was then (though not uniformly; you are safer in Houston today than in 1950, surprisingly). On the other hand, it was a bit higher at the beginning of the last century, which is not too surprising as the solve rate was much lower and so were sentences (an average of 10 years for murder in 1910, whereas by 2003 it's 85). A good reference on this subject is The collapse of American Criminal Justice by William Stuntz.
vaadu 12y ago
The people that make money from the law enforcement and private prison industries don't want people to be aware of these numbers. It makes it too difficult to sell new LEO toys and prison beds. Legalizing mj nationwide will probably help the numbers go even lower. LEOs should be focusing more on the nastier drugs like meth, gangs and white collar crime against the elderly and others that are vulnerable.
ww520 12y ago
The rise of video games. More teenagers are playing video games and venting out their anger in the games or online instead of hanging out in the streets shooting each other.
- evli 12y ago
  I am sure this is the biggest reason. Nothing to talk about more access to education, birth control, ...
  - pdkl95 12y ago
    It may not be the main reason (which is believe is the tetraethyl lead mentioned in other posts), the effect videogames has had on violence is not trivial. Probably not for "outlet for rage" reasons, but simply because they are a powerful draw on someone's time. Spending time playing video games is less time left for loitering and petty crime. I submit as "evidence" a bit of anecdata I like to call the "doom curve": http://blogs-images.forbes.com/erikkain/files/2012/12/videogameviolencechart-e1356881775994.jpg http://blogs-images.forbes.com/erikkain/files/2012/12/videog...
- jiggy2011 12y ago
  I wonder if the people who send offensive messages to others in online games are the same who would in previous generations would have sprayed offensive graffiti on walls?
  - mikeash 12y ago
    Or perhaps literally stab someone in the face after losing a game rather than impotently threatening to do so online.
wmeredith 12y ago
That's because there's no money in reporting good news. You want a killer startup idea? Find a way to make money by telling people good news.
- vacri 12y ago
  Some people already have: google 'good news church'.
hackuser 12y ago
How much is due to changes in or the unreliability of the statistics? The article (and many others) say perceptions haven't caught up with reality, but really they mean that perception hasn't caught up with statistics -- perhaps the statistics don't reflect reality. I don't know one way or the other, but I haven't seen these questions addressed: 1) I don't know much about how the data is produced, but certainly if law enforcement practitioners, down to the sergeants, are under pressure to produce better and better statistics (which many reports say is true), they are incentivized to reduce those stats and not crime. I've read news stories of police not reporting or fudging crime stats (e.g., reporting a serious crime as a moderate one, not reporting lower-level crimes, etc.). And under that pressure, they may use strategies that produce more numerical improvement than public safety. 2) How could the FBI accurately measure nation-wide crime, every mugging in every small town? Do others measure it? 3) Some of the numbers are extraordinary; doesn't that raise red flags for you?: (both quotes are from the article) * "the F.B.I.'s count of violent crimes reported to law enforcement has declined from a rate of 747 violent incidents per 100,000 people in 1993 to 387 ... over this period, the homicide rate has fallen by 51 percent; forcible rapes have declined by 35 percent; robberies have decreased by 56 percent; and the rate of aggravated assault has been cut by 45 percent. Property crime rates are also sharply down." * "The National Crime Victimization Survey reports that the rate of violent victimizations has declined by 67 percent since 1993. This reflects a 70 percent decline in rape and sexual assault; a 66 percent decline in robbery; a 77 percent decline in aggravated assault; and a 64 percent decline in simple assault."
- greatzebu 12y ago
  This is a very reasonable question. One way to get at the question of whether the reduction is real is to look at crimes where it's hard to game the statistics and see if they follow the same trends as other crimes. One of the best crimes to look at is murder, since it's much harder to reclassify or not report a crime when there's a dead body involved. Looking at the statistics for murder and non-negligent manslaughter from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States seems to support the idea that the reduction is real--the rate has been cut in half since 1990, and the reduction is broadly similar to the reductions in other types of crime over that period as described by that article.
mrjayharris 12y ago
I believe there is a similar thing happening with people's beliefs about aviation safety. I think people understand it's generally safe, but I don't think most people realize how incredibly safe major US airlines are. The media plays a similar role there too, the difference being that some years there aren't even any crashes to report on, so they report when something goes wrong but everyone comes out safely anyway as if that's something to be scared of when really that highlights how good emergency procedures are.
suprgeek 12y ago
The victims Violent Crime may have decreased but the victims of non-violent (white-collar) crimes may have actually increased. How many people were "victimized" in the recent Financial crisis? How about the spate of people in asset forfeiture by the police just for being in the wrong place? How many victims of recent Credit card breaches? These stats might accurately reflect that the US is moving from an industrial to a post-industrial information & services economy - the criminals are correspondingly adapting to where the real money is.
- AnthonyMouse 12y ago
  > The victims Violent Crime may have decreased but the victims of non-violent (white-collar) crimes may have actually increased. This is an extremely important point. The way you fight white collar crime is comprehensively different than the way you fight violent crime. BearCats and SWAT teams are utterly useless. Traditional law enforcement in general just doesn't work. You can't deter systemic risk with post facto sentencing. If the criminals live in a non-extradition country then obtaining evidence against them is pointless. What is necessary is to help victims to not be victims rather than trying to apprehend the perpetrators after the fact. The problem is we put the FBI and DoJ in charge of it rather than the National Science Foundation. We would do well to take half the DoJ's budget and put it into grants for computer security research, free security audits for popular software and libraries and UX improvements for the likes of PGP.
dusklight 12y ago
One thing to consider is that there are certain parts of NY that can be considered very safe, whereas other parts are not. The same thing probably happens in Dallas and Houston, the difference being the Texas cities are driving cities so you would just drive through/around the dangerous parts, whereas in NY you would have to walk through them.
collyw 12y ago
OK, this probably doesn't apply to violent crime, but petty crime like pickpocketing, etc. There is basically no point in reporting it. The police will do nothing. I live in Barcelona, and there is a lot of this stuff goes on (I had my wallet stolen once, lots of tourists get robbed). I went to the police when my friends camera was stolen. Did anything happen after? No. Yet I have been stopped 5 times for my cycling behavior (going through red lights on a quite road usually).
- jsmcgd 12y ago
  Are you suggesting there is an increasing trend in pick pocketing and that's why the police no longer act on it and/or vice versa?
  - collyw 12y ago
    Neither. I think the general perception (certainly amongst the younger people) is that the police are a corrupt waste of time. They are very enthusiastic with protestors in a violent way, but do nothing about things getting stolen.

104 points by jwmerrill 12y ago

The wonderful thing about broad statistics, a decline in one area can mask increases in others. Here in Santa Cruz (city, not sure about county) lots of crime categories are up across the board. It is pretty darn noticeable.

mikeleeorg 12y ago
I don't know how accurate this data is, but I looked around and it seems to match the numbers that other sites listed: http://www.city-data.com/crime/crime-Santa-Cruz-California.html http://www.city-data.com/crime/crime-Santa-Cruz-California.h... It doesn't show any major trends upwards (or downwards) in the crime rate for Santa Cruz. Are there other sources of data on which you are referring? I ask because it looks like you are being downvoted (I didn't downvote you), perhaps because your comment didn't come across like one with data behind it.
- jmspring 12y ago
  The site shows particular numbers, but having lived here 24+ years, the statistics don't reflect reality. The problem is, "petty theft" doesn't get written up, in most cases if it is under $1000 in loss, the police will not take a report. Bike theft? Well, good luck with that - if Paul Graham was to witness you jacking a $5k bike off of my car and he called the cops and the bike wasn't registered, the cops will not do anything. Thief tools on you and you are "checked out" by the cops, unless there is an outstanding warrant, you are let go. There is a big local issue with actually "punishing" any petty crime. I saw the stats, but the reality is way out of whack with them mainly due to cops/courts/DAs not really enforcing things. Crimes related to drug use -- heroin, meth, bath salts -- generally don't even get into the system. Take them to jail, they are out in a couple of hours max. If you want specifics, I am happy to provide.
throwaway344 12y ago
Is there a source that you have on that? I typically use city-data for that sort of thing, and their page doesn't tell the same story. http://www.city-data.com/crime/crime-Santa-Cruz-California.html http://www.city-data.com/crime/crime-Santa-Cruz-California.h... While theft and arson are up, rape and assault are down.
thrownaway2424 12y ago
Even if crime is up in SC, it's almost guaranteed that some locale will have rising crime even in a nation of falling crime. It's just a stochastic process where the system boundaries used for reporting crime are more or less randomly determined. I'd be more surprised to hear that there was no such city in America with rising crime.

clarkmoody 12y ago

> It’s an unfortunate fact that media reporting on individual crimes yields a relentlessly dismal drumbeat of downbeat news. But even as each reported crime yields a story that is terrifying enough to shape our perceptions, the truth is that none of them tells us much about the broader trends. Far better to ignore the anecdotes and focus instead on the big picture, and the hard data tells us: There’s been a remarkable decline in crime. But then the media isn't really about giving us perspective, is it?

spingsprong 12y ago
No, it really isn't. It's about getting viewers, selling newspapers, and getting clicks. And the best way to achieve that is by using strong emotion, usually negative. Fear, hatred, disgust, anger. I'm not sure how a democracy is supposed to work, when the people voting are being given bad information on such a massive scale. There are so many important areas when what people believe and what is true are miles apart.
- arethuza 12y ago
  "The best way to achieve that is by using strong emotion, usually negative. Fear, hatred, disgust, anger." Take those topics and add a heavy dose of celebrity trivia and you've described the UK Daily Mail perfectly.

ryangittins 12y ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultivation_theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultivation_theory

Terr_ 12y ago
I guess it depends to what extent you think TV drives culture versus reflects it. It is kind of amusing to look at certain old movies and see how much less-believable they've become, particularly the ones that implied urban crime was going to get much worse before getting better (if ever.) Ex: Robocop, Judge Dredd, Escape from New York, the introductory portion of Demolition Man...

xexers 12y ago

The same thing is happening with world poverty. Most people think poverty is getting worse, but the opposite is true http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_and_ola_rosling_how_not_to_be_ignorant_about_the_world http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_and_ola_rosling_how_not_to_be_...

ekianjo 12y ago
That's what happens when people keep talking about "growing inequalities" instead of focusing on the fact that everyone is actually getting richer with time (and obviously people who already have a lot of capital grow richer faster). There's no zero-sum game at work.
- eru 12y ago
  > (and obviously people who already have a lot of capital grow richer faster) That's not so obvious, and not trivially true.
  - ekianjo 12y ago
    > That's not so obvious, and not trivially true. Well if you have 1 million dollar and you don't grow your capital faster than someone who has 100 dollars in the bank, you are doing something deeply wrong with your investments. When you have lots of capital you have access to investment opportunities which simply do not exist below a certain level, too. So I'm not sure where the "not trivially true" is coming from.
    - eru 12y ago
      First, we have to decide whether we are going to measure absolute differences or proportions. If we go for proportions, which makes sense since utility of money is roughly logarithmic, it is not at all clear that you can grow 1 million dollar faster than 100 dollar. If we go for absolute differences, than most of the time the millionair will be ahead. But in the recent financial crisis lots of rich people lost lots of wealth (at least on paper), while poor people can only lose so much in an absolute sense.

teuobk 12y ago

Still lacking is consensus on why violent crime has declined. Depending on who you ask, reasons cited include: - Mass incarceration (usually credited with about 25% of the crime decline) - More gun control (e.g., the 1994-2004 assault weapons ban) - Less gun control (e.g., the rise of "shall-issue" concealed carry permits) - Cultural change - Banning of lead in automotive fuel [Nevin 1999] Perhaps all of these mattered; perhaps none did. We don't really know.

spacehome 12y ago
Add legalization of abortion to that list.
- damon_c 12y ago
  Here is a citation to support this: http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/ResponseToFooteGoetz2006.pdf http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/ResponseToFoot...
- vaadu 12y ago
  Is it just abortion or an increased use of conception prevention methods and morning after drugs?
- dfc 12y ago
  The abortion explanation has been repeated so frequently that many people have accepted this explanation without digging further into the details. This is one of many explanations that Steven Pinker discusses in his book "Better Angels of our Nature." I am not sure it is as clear cut as you imagine: (I apologize for the lengthy excerpt) When I told people I was writing a book on the historical decline of violence, I was repeatedly informed that the phenomenon had already been solved. Rates of violence have come down, they explained to me, because after abortion was legalized by the 1973 Roe v. Wade U.S. Supreme Court decision, the unwanted children who would ordinarily have grown up to be criminals were not born in the first place, because their begrudging or unfit mothers had had abortions instead. I first heard of this theory in 2001 when it was proposed by the economists John Donohue and Steven Levitt, but it seemed too cute to be true.147 Any hypothesis that comes out of left field to explain a massive social trend with a single overlooked event will almost certainly turn out to be wrong, even if it has some data supporting it at the time. But Levitt, together with the journalist Stephen Dubner, popularized the theory in their bestseller Freakonomics , and now a large proportion of the public believes that crime went down in the 1990s because women aborted their crime-fated fetuses in the 1970s. To be fair, Levitt went on to argue that Roe v. Wade was just one of four causes of the crime decline, and he has presented sophisticated correlational statistics in support of the connection. For example, he showed that the handful of states that legalized abortion before 1973 were the first to see their crime rates go down.148 But these statistics compare the two ends of a long, hypothetical, and tenuous causal chain—the availability of legal abortion as the first link and the decline in crime two decades later as the last—and ignore all the links in between. The links include the assumptions that legal abortion causes fewer unwanted children, that unwanted children are more likely to become criminals, and that the first abortion-culled generation was the one spearheading the 1990s crime decline. But there are other explanations for the overall correlation (for example, that the large liberal states that first legalized abortion were also the first states to see the rise and fall of the crack epidemic), and the intermediate links have turned out to be fragile or nonexistent.149 To begin with, the freakonomics theory assumes that women were just as likely to have conceived unwanted children before and after 1973, and that the only difference was whether the children were born. But once abortion was legalized, couples may have treated it as a backup method of birth control and may have engaged in more unprotected sex. If the women conceived more unwanted children in the first place, the option of aborting more of them could leave the proportion of unwanted children the same. In fact, the proportion of unwanted children could even have increased if women were emboldened by the abortion option to have more unprotected sex in the heat of the moment, but then procrastinated or had second thoughts once they were pregnant. That may help explain why in the years since 1973 the proportion of children born to women in the most vulnerable categories—poor, single, teenage, and African American—did not decrease, as the freakonomics theory would predict. It increased, and by a lot.150 What about differences among individual women within a crime-prone population? Here the freakonomics theory would seem to get things backwards. Among women who are accidentally pregnant and unprepared to raise a child, the ones who terminate their pregnancies are likely to be forward-thinking, realistic, and disciplined, whereas the ones who carry the child to term are more likely to be fatalistic, disorganized, or immaturely focused on the thought of a cute baby rather than an unruly adolescent. Several studies have borne this out.151 Young pregnant women who opt for abortions get better grades, are less likely to be on welfare, and are more likely to finish school than their counterparts who have miscarriages or carry their pregnancies to term. The availability of abortion thus may have led to a generation that is more prone to crime because it weeded out just the children who, whether through genes or environment, were most likely to exercise maturity and self-control. Also, the freakonomists’ theory about the psychological causes of crime comes right out of “Gee, Officer Krupke,” when a gang member says of his parents, “They didn’t wanna have me, but somehow I was had. Leapin’ lizards! That’s why I’m so bad!” And it is about as plausible. Though unwanted children may grow up to commit more crimes, it is more likely that women in crime-prone environments have more unwanted children than that unwantedness causes criminal behavior directly. In studies that pit the effects of parenting against the effects of the children’s peer environment, holding genes constant, the peer environment almost always wins.152 Finally, if easy abortion after 1973 sculpted a more crime-averse generation, the crime decline should have begun with the youngest group and then crept up the age brackets as they got older. The sixteen-year-olds of 1993, for example (who were born in 1977, when abortions were in full swing), should have committed fewer crimes than the sixteen-year-olds of 1983 (who were born in 1967, when abortion was illegal). By similar logic, the twenty-two-year-olds of 1993 should have remained violent, because they were born in pre-Roe 1971. Only in the late 1990s, when the first post-Roe generation reached their twenties, should the twenty-something age bracket have become less violent. In fact, the opposite happened. When the first post-Roe generation came of age in the late 1980s and early 1990s, they did not tug the homicide statistics downward; they indulged in an unprecedented spree of mayhem. The crime decline began when the older cohorts, born well before Roe, laid down their guns and knives, and from them the lower homicide rates trickled down the age scale.153

ianbicking 12y ago

Even though I wish it were true, I'm not sure the decline in crime really indicates greater safety. For instance, one major contribution to the decrease in the murder rate is that people survive gunshot wounds much better than they used to. In terms of the human cost of violence that's actually great, but it's not exactly safety. And of course people have become much more safety conscious now, we drive safer cars, we walk around less, we don't let our kids out unattended, etc. All those things actually do avoid crime, and so reduce the amount of crime, but they don't increase safety. Which is to say: our tolerance for risk has gone down, and behavior has changed because of that, but that doesn't (and rationally shouldn't!) affect our concern about crime. And perceptions are really about the concern about crime (something that actually affects the person being surveyed), not the belief in what crime exists (which only abstractly affects someone) – and it is not irrational that the concern remains steady or goes up even as actual crime rates go down. It may not be good or healthy that the concern remains steady, but it's not irrational.

alexbecker 12y ago
Re your first point: every other category of violent crime has fallen as well.
lstamour 12y ago
I wondered if population growth also accounts for some of this, though by rough math, the US population has grown by 25% in the last 20 years... and this assumes that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes.
mikeyouse 12y ago
This isn't remotely true. The total violent crime rate has decreased by ~50% in the last 20 years. The rate of "Nonfatal Firearm Victimizations" has fallen by ~75% from it's 1990's peak: Overall: http://i.imgur.com/EpZQTo5.jpg http://i.imgur.com/EpZQTo5.jpg By Race: http://i.imgur.com/h7rQVf2.jpg http://i.imgur.com/h7rQVf2.jpg (From this PDF: http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/fv9311.pdf http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/fv9311.pdf)
- 12y ago

lexcorvus 12y ago

Although I rarely see it considered, one factor that may contribute to a decline in crime rates is flight. When people flee crime-ridden areas, crime rates should go down, but mainly as a side-effect of a worrisome trend. Might this be part of the explanation for the drop in crime? It seems plausible, but I've never seen a careful evaluation of the hypothesis.

Crito 12y ago
Without bothering to actually look at the numbers, I suspect you are wrong. Flight was a big thing in the 50's through 80's (although it has continued in a few notable locations (Detroit, etc)). The 90s and 00's are best characterized as a reversal of flight though. Cities like NYC were rejuvenated, young successful people are once again moving into major cities.

georgemcbay 12y ago

Not only haven't they "caught up" but the 24-hour news cycle seems to have made many people (perhaps most people) in the US believe that the crime rates have gone up significantly. I've quit trying to correct people about this (because it is apparently fruitless) on places like Facebook where friends and family will make off-handed claims about how bad the crime is these days compared to "the good old days" (where the "good old days" is circa the late 70s to the early 90s relative to these people's ages). All of your fancy data is no match for people's emotional response perceptions.

rodgerd 12y ago
> Not only haven't they "caught up" but the 24-hour news cycle seems to have made many people (perhaps most people) in the US believe that the crime rates have gone up significantly. There's far too much money to be made and too much gain for some political parties to do anything other than pretend it's the end days of the crimpocalypse.
baddox 12y ago
I'd like to see it compared with news viewership/readership from various sources. Do people who watch TV news overestimate crime more than those who read news online? How does education about current events affect the estimates? Though I have no data, I'm skeptical that the 24-hour news cycle is the primary factor. I would guess that people always tend to overestimate the crime rate, as a far fundamental bias, similar to how then-modern technology is always ruining society [0], or "kids these days" are always the worst generation ever to grace the planet. The article doesn't say whether people have gotten less accurate over time with their crime rate estimates. [0] http://xkcd.com/1227/ http://xkcd.com/1227/
tedunangst 12y ago
An observation hardly unique to crime stats. The 24 hour internet is happy to convince you that the police have never been more brutal, your food has never been more poisoned, etc.

fiatmoney 12y ago

Sure, if you compare to the tail end of the crack wars. Compare to 1950 or 1900 or 1980 or... What does this prove exactly? The perception of "safety" is also not only a function of "crimes per capita". "Blocks safe for a woman to walk through alone at night" or "total victimization rate" make just about as much sense. "Obviousness of safe / unsafe areas" is also a good one - if you have to have local knowledge of what is a "good neighbourhood" or not in order to avoid being victimized, obviously non-locals will develop a perception of the area as unsafe. Wow, from the downvotes people seem really invested in particular choices of time horizon & measures of safety. Who knew?

seanflyon 12y ago
Your safety is a measure of how likely you are to be attacked, which is fundamentally a per capita measurement. If there are twice as many people and 10% more attacks, that means that the average person is less likely to be attacked.
- fiatmoney 12y ago
  No. Crimes per capita can obviously be concentrated in a smaller segment of the population (for instance, those that live in high crime areas). Half the population twice as frequently, or vice versa, looks the same in aggregate but not in perception. And geographic concerns do matter. "I must live in this expensive area to avoid being mugged" drives a perception of unsafety even if you are not being mugged.
anigbrowl 12y ago
You're partly right. The 1950s were particularly safe and crime is somewhat higher now than it was then (though not uniformly; you are safer in Houston today than in 1950, surprisingly). On the other hand, it was a bit higher at the beginning of the last century, which is not too surprising as the solve rate was much lower and so were sentences (an average of 10 years for murder in 1910, whereas by 2003 it's 85). A good reference on this subject is The collapse of American Criminal Justice by William Stuntz.

vaadu 12y ago

The people that make money from the law enforcement and private prison industries don't want people to be aware of these numbers. It makes it too difficult to sell new LEO toys and prison beds. Legalizing mj nationwide will probably help the numbers go even lower. LEOs should be focusing more on the nastier drugs like meth, gangs and white collar crime against the elderly and others that are vulnerable.

ww520 12y ago

The rise of video games. More teenagers are playing video games and venting out their anger in the games or online instead of hanging out in the streets shooting each other.

evli 12y ago
I am sure this is the biggest reason. Nothing to talk about more access to education, birth control, ...
- pdkl95 12y ago
  It may not be the main reason (which is believe is the tetraethyl lead mentioned in other posts), the effect videogames has had on violence is not trivial. Probably not for "outlet for rage" reasons, but simply because they are a powerful draw on someone's time. Spending time playing video games is less time left for loitering and petty crime. I submit as "evidence" a bit of anecdata I like to call the "doom curve": http://blogs-images.forbes.com/erikkain/files/2012/12/videogameviolencechart-e1356881775994.jpg http://blogs-images.forbes.com/erikkain/files/2012/12/videog...
jiggy2011 12y ago
I wonder if the people who send offensive messages to others in online games are the same who would in previous generations would have sprayed offensive graffiti on walls?
- mikeash 12y ago
  Or perhaps literally stab someone in the face after losing a game rather than impotently threatening to do so online.

wmeredith 12y ago

That's because there's no money in reporting good news. You want a killer startup idea? Find a way to make money by telling people good news.

vacri 12y ago
Some people already have: google 'good news church'.

hackuser 12y ago

How much is due to changes in or the unreliability of the statistics? The article (and many others) say perceptions haven't caught up with reality, but really they mean that perception hasn't caught up with statistics -- perhaps the statistics don't reflect reality. I don't know one way or the other, but I haven't seen these questions addressed: 1) I don't know much about how the data is produced, but certainly if law enforcement practitioners, down to the sergeants, are under pressure to produce better and better statistics (which many reports say is true), they are incentivized to reduce those stats and not crime. I've read news stories of police not reporting or fudging crime stats (e.g., reporting a serious crime as a moderate one, not reporting lower-level crimes, etc.). And under that pressure, they may use strategies that produce more numerical improvement than public safety. 2) How could the FBI accurately measure nation-wide crime, every mugging in every small town? Do others measure it? 3) Some of the numbers are extraordinary; doesn't that raise red flags for you?: (both quotes are from the article) * "the F.B.I.'s count of violent crimes reported to law enforcement has declined from a rate of 747 violent incidents per 100,000 people in 1993 to 387 ... over this period, the homicide rate has fallen by 51 percent; forcible rapes have declined by 35 percent; robberies have decreased by 56 percent; and the rate of aggravated assault has been cut by 45 percent. Property crime rates are also sharply down." * "The National Crime Victimization Survey reports that the rate of violent victimizations has declined by 67 percent since 1993. This reflects a 70 percent decline in rape and sexual assault; a 66 percent decline in robbery; a 77 percent decline in aggravated assault; and a 64 percent decline in simple assault."

greatzebu 12y ago
This is a very reasonable question. One way to get at the question of whether the reduction is real is to look at crimes where it's hard to game the statistics and see if they follow the same trends as other crimes. One of the best crimes to look at is murder, since it's much harder to reclassify or not report a crime when there's a dead body involved. Looking at the statistics for murder and non-negligent manslaughter from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States seems to support the idea that the reduction is real--the rate has been cut in half since 1990, and the reduction is broadly similar to the reductions in other types of crime over that period as described by that article.

mrjayharris 12y ago

I believe there is a similar thing happening with people's beliefs about aviation safety. I think people understand it's generally safe, but I don't think most people realize how incredibly safe major US airlines are. The media plays a similar role there too, the difference being that some years there aren't even any crashes to report on, so they report when something goes wrong but everyone comes out safely anyway as if that's something to be scared of when really that highlights how good emergency procedures are.

suprgeek 12y ago

The victims Violent Crime may have decreased but the victims of non-violent (white-collar) crimes may have actually increased. How many people were "victimized" in the recent Financial crisis? How about the spate of people in asset forfeiture by the police just for being in the wrong place? How many victims of recent Credit card breaches? These stats might accurately reflect that the US is moving from an industrial to a post-industrial information & services economy - the criminals are correspondingly adapting to where the real money is.

AnthonyMouse 12y ago
> The victims Violent Crime may have decreased but the victims of non-violent (white-collar) crimes may have actually increased. This is an extremely important point. The way you fight white collar crime is comprehensively different than the way you fight violent crime. BearCats and SWAT teams are utterly useless. Traditional law enforcement in general just doesn't work. You can't deter systemic risk with post facto sentencing. If the criminals live in a non-extradition country then obtaining evidence against them is pointless. What is necessary is to help victims to not be victims rather than trying to apprehend the perpetrators after the fact. The problem is we put the FBI and DoJ in charge of it rather than the National Science Foundation. We would do well to take half the DoJ's budget and put it into grants for computer security research, free security audits for popular software and libraries and UX improvements for the likes of PGP.

dusklight 12y ago

One thing to consider is that there are certain parts of NY that can be considered very safe, whereas other parts are not. The same thing probably happens in Dallas and Houston, the difference being the Texas cities are driving cities so you would just drive through/around the dangerous parts, whereas in NY you would have to walk through them.

collyw 12y ago

OK, this probably doesn't apply to violent crime, but petty crime like pickpocketing, etc. There is basically no point in reporting it. The police will do nothing. I live in Barcelona, and there is a lot of this stuff goes on (I had my wallet stolen once, lots of tourists get robbed). I went to the police when my friends camera was stolen. Did anything happen after? No. Yet I have been stopped 5 times for my cycling behavior (going through red lights on a quite road usually).

jsmcgd 12y ago
Are you suggesting there is an increasing trend in pick pocketing and that's why the police no longer act on it and/or vice versa?
- collyw 12y ago
  Neither. I think the general perception (certainly amongst the younger people) is that the police are a corrupt waste of time. They are very enthusiastic with protestors in a violent way, but do nothing about things getting stolen.