> "The national picture shows that murder is falling. We have data from over 200 cities showing a 12.2% decline ... in 2023 relative to 2022," Asher said, citing his own analysis of public data. He found instances of rape, robbery and aggravated assault were all down too.
> A Gallup poll released in November found 77% of Americans believed there was more crime in the country than the year before. And 63% felt there was either a "very" or "extremely" serious crime problem — the highest in the poll's history going back to 2000.
Violent crime is going down. The survey was about overall crime. So the premise of this article is misleading.
The dichotomies presented make more sense if you accept that overall crime is up even if violent crime is down: Police numbers can't prevent murders but they can prevent break-ins - homeless camps don't put people into danger but they do help fence stolen goods. A lot of low-level crimes are not even being reported anymore.
I won't speak for everyone, but I don't really spend most of my days worried about getting murdered or assaulted. But I do spend a lot of time worried about getting robbed or having my car broken into (again!).
I don't worry about being robbed or my car broken into, but I do worry about being hit and killed by a reckless driver. I don't think that's what people have in mind when they think of "murder" or "assault," but that's genuinely my biggest fear to my well-being.
One of the most powerful reminders of the powers-that-be's priorities is the observation that, given a set number of enforcement cameras, they will be used as speed cameras to generate revenue rather than traffic light cameras to get dangerous drivers off the road.
Phone scams are at an all time high. The same for identity theft and other forms of fraud. That article avoids it but I'm sure it's on people's minds. The FTC reported Friday that more than $10 Billion was stolen via fraud in 2023 (+14% from 22).[1]
Talking about crime writ large and only selecting homelessness and murder is such a narrow view of crime that it seems almost meaningless.
So I did some digging. I found crime trends in US Cities as put together by the Council on Criminal Justice[2] in mid 2023. Motor Vehicle Theft is up over 30% and homicide is down 9%. Even that doesn't even attempt to touch fraud (ctrl+f for fraud and scam both came up empty). The initial article says only "some nonviolent crimes like car theft are up in certain cities". This seems clearly contradicted by the other article I found.
The only thing clear to me having done this particular exercise is that probably both the reporting and the polling here are inadequate and incomplete, and that the people who are most being hurt aren't going to get one lick of help.
Yea, I’ve been robbed twice in the last year (one car break in and a bike theft) and we didn’t even bother to report it. I don’t want to lose my insurance! I need to save it for something bigger.
I completely agree with your sentiment but it makes me wonder why we pay for insurance at all. It's a complete scam.
Pay money monthly to a company "in case" something bad happens.
Then when you need to collect, you are treated like a criminal and they will do everything they can to avoid paying you. Your comment hits the nail on the head... you are paying for something yet afraid to use it because "what if something else worse happens". You need insurance insurance now.
They are not in the business of paying claims. They are in the business of tricking people into monthly premiums so they can deny their claims. If they can deny more claims than they fulfill I bet it's very lucrative.
Insurance is (morally) the worst industry ever. It is a product built on a lie. You wonder why people have no trust in corporations. This is why.
We had a record 2023 year for murder here in Seattle, and our property crime really isn't subsiding. We are low for violent crime already (relatively speaking, southern and midwest cities make everyone else look much better), but property crime...the only reason it can go down is people give up on reporting it (since nothing is done anyways).
I don't trust surveys as much as I'm suspicious of official reported crime statistics. Murder statistics are actually incredibly reliable, since not reporting one is also considered a crime, whereas you can blow off reporting almost anything else.
Even if that was a falsifiable premise, that's not a very strong argument. If "average" income goes up just because there are a few more billionaires that move to my city, it doesn't actually mean I am richer.
If most people are living measurably worse lives because of crime, but the already low rate of murders drops a few points, I don't think we should rest on our laurels.
"And honestly, people conflate that with crime, with street safety," she said. "One thing I'm starting to learn in reporting on public safety is that you can put numbers in front of people all day, and numbers just don't speak to people the way narrative does."
"The number of murders across the country surged by nearly 30% between 2019 and 2020..."
"We have data from over 200 cities showing a 12.2% decline ... in 2023 relative to 2022,...."
It's so annoying that even "good" news outlets like NPR are incompetent when it comes to showing statistical data. There is no good reason to mix city rates vs country rates or speak only in percentages instead of absolute numbers. Some quick Googling shows https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/explorer/crim... (switch to the homocide data) which gives 2019-2022 numbers as 5.1, 6.5, 6.8, 6.3 per capita.
That's a neat page. The data goes back to 1985. The homicide rate in 2021 was 6.8/100,000, which is the same as it was in 1997. 2022's 6.3 is the same as 1998.
I maintain my position that "the content is horseshit" should be added to the list of reasons to flag a submission. Lot of poorly-researched nonsense stays on the front page far too long.
Not sure what you mean--it seems like most articles that touch on politics get flagged (as this one did). Just like with upvoters, it is impossible to know whether those who flagged it did so because of politics or because they thought the article was of poor quality.
The article notes a major uptick from 2019 to 2020, and then refers to declines from 2021 to 2023.
What about from 2019 to 2023? It could be simultaneously true that violent crime is dropping and that it remains above a baseline from 4-5 years ago (which would likely also affect perception). So is it?
Sometimes criminality drops but at a too high price. Some cities in Latin America are "safe" from a statistical point of view but nobody dares go out at night, or even during the day, in some neighbourhoods because it's too dangerous.
I assumed OP was talking about seeing crimes as a percentage of crime opportunities, whereas overall crime counts on a per capita basis might mask that people spend less time outdoors because of the risk of crime.
So, it’s cool that “crime is down” but honestly the article that NPR published is pretty awful journalism and really doesn’t present the truth, which is more complicated.
Most of the time they are reporting on the FBI’s uniform crime reporting index:
This data has been under huge scrutiny and criticism for its inaccuracy:
The FBI Uniform Crime Report's (UCR's) 'murder and nonnegligent manslaughter' data are so seriously flawed that the only figure they can provide criminologists is the number of deaths investigated by police as potentially criminal homicides, and the weapons use data reported by the UCR and the National Crime Survey (victimization data) are unreliable as well.
The “journalists” at NPR annd other news organizations even bother to mention any of this when they write their articles. The quality of their journalism should be questioned and people should be very aware of the unreliability of the statistical data, especially violent crimes like homicides.
I mean that the statistics sometimes don't tell the whole story.
The city might be "safe", statistically speaking, but nobody gets out of home because everybody is afraid and tries to avoid public spaces as much as possible. So you have a whole generation being raised inside apartments and closed spaces basically, this was the high price I was talking about.
Some areas of the city get historically low crime rates because they are essentially avoided at all costs, not because the place is safe. People "locked up" inside their own homes is not what I would call public security, even though the data will show that the numbers improved.
Carjacking is rampant in large part because of what Kia did, which really ought to land that company in a lake of civil liability. Carjacking, at least as it's practiced in Chicagoland, starts with a burner car that rolls up on the victim to disgorge the armed robbers. Kias, which can be hotwired with a broken USB cable, offered carjackers a literal citywide fleet of burner vehicles.
"Toyotas and Hondas were the most commonly stolen car make in the District in 2022, with 501 Toyotas and 413 Hondas reported stolen. Hyundai and Kia were the third and seventh most commonly stolen, respectively, with 355 Hyundais and 192 Kias reported stolen last year.
By comparison, D.C. police data show 1,468 Hyundais and 806 Kias were stolen between Jan. 1 and July 20 of this year, accounting for more than half of the nearly 4,000 car thefts in the District. An I-Team analysis shows that, on average, a Hyundai or Kia is stolen in D.C. every two hours and seven minutes."
Though, people are more worried about armed carjacking which is manufacturer agnostic
The targets of carjackings aren't Kias. Why would you carjack a Kia? You can just pick them up off the street. Carjackers use Kias to steal other kinds of cars.
That isn't carjacking. That's auto theft. Carjacking is when a criminal takes over a running car, oftentimes via threat of violence. No interlock is stopping that.
If that were the case, carjacking numbers would be up wherever Kias circulate, which is clearly not the case. Criminality is rampant not because there are opportunities to commit crime, but because there are people willing to commit them.
The rate of carjackings is a miniscule fraction of what it was when I was a kid learning to drive.
It's dropped from over 0.5 per 100k to around 0.1 per 100k over the last 30 years.
I don't fall into the trap of focusing on year-on-year changes, but instead I look at trends because my primary concern is "are things safer for my kids than they were for me when I was a kid".
I’m not familiar with NYC or a lack of filing per se, but I could believe an honest lack of reporting downtrends the real numbers.
I’ve been victim to several violent crimes in my city in the 2020-2022 timespan (multiple pistol brandishing in traffic, one shot out window, and a knife brandishing in a grocery store)
In the first instance I was asked if I wanted to file a report about an hour later after the man had long fled (I had only a partial plate and they couldn’t get a match based off that information.) I was told, really, no there’s not much that would come out of it but they would file if I asked they do. I thanked the officer for his time and let him know I wouldn’t bother burdening him with the paperwork.
I never bothered reporting the next several incidences.
The only report I know was filed was the knife wielding man threatening to kill me in front of my child at 5.00 PM on a Friday in a crowded grocery store. I waited 35 minutes for police to respond to the call for the sole fact that the man might be waiting in the parking lot and I didn’t intend on leaving without a police escort lest I have to shoot down a man in front of my child. Never requested a report there, but I know it was filed.
I found out because I was telling my barber about it a week later and he mentioned that story was in the local city paper’s police blotter.
I can’t say it’s particularly unique. I’ve had coworkers harassed in similar fashions, they never reported because they knew it was a waste of everyone’s time. The police officer that works security at our old church told me he had it happen once off-duty he just flashed his own pistol and badge and the fool fled.
Under De Blasio, NYPD starting protesting oversight with work 'slowdowns'
" was a warning to the public as well, criminologists say, with Lynch alluding to the "Ferguson effect" argument, in which police pull back on acting, leading to a work slowdown because of criticism or administrative decisions perceived to endanger their well being on the streets."
It doesn’t matter what the numbers say, this is about emotions and anecdotes.
It’s about as safe as ever for children, and yet most parents think it’s too dangerous for their kids to go to school on their own, which used to be common place and we had far less technology to help.
People will tell you the world is overall more dangerous and that’s absolutely not the case.
It is really scary that peoples' perceptions of reality seem to be getting less accurate over time, especially in regards to important issues like crime levels and the health of the economy.
The success of democracy depends on people being able to elect effective representatives, and if people can't even accurately perceive what's happening around them in the world right now then I just don't see how we can expect people to make remotely informed decisions at the voting booth :-(
If I had to guess, I feel like this problem is stemming from social media, both due to it spreading misinformation and due to it acting as an echo chamber that amplifies negative sentiments in general. I don't know if this is really what's going on though or if there's some other explanation for this phenomenon. I wish there was something I could do.
I strongly believe social media is the cause of this. I suspect that nation state actors purposely spam videos (even older ones) that drum up fear and division (eg black guy beating up old white woman or white cops beating up black kid). People can now see so many horrible things that have always been happening but are and have always been rare that they think these things are happening all the time.
The media and certain political interests in the US have an interest in making everyone afraid of crime. The former needs it for ratings (if it bleeds it leads) and the latter to scare you into voting for them.
There are a handful of cities having property crime epidemics due to bad local policies, but crime overall continues to fall.
And other political interests have an interest in making everyone think crime is down, to stop voters from looking elsewhere.
They headline is based on a thin slice of data, that crime is down from 2022 to 2023, despite being up far far more on 2023. Then it mocks people for saying on a 2023 survey that they perceive crime as being up, based on their allegedly invalid ife experiences in 2020-2022. It's the same kind of deception as the "transitory inflation" nonsense that went around.
Then the article lists a litany of rebuttals to their own thesis -- major cities where violent crime and property crime are up recently.
The article has nothing of value to say except that crime is a complex issue with many factors.
It's low-key propaganda for the incumbent government.
There was a spike in 2020. If you wanted to blame an administration you'd blame Trump since it was toward the end of his term, but it almost certainly has more to do with COVID related mental health issues and disruption.
> There are a handful of cities having property crime epidemics due to bad local policies
That new trend seems to be the majority of news I see re: crime. That plus DAs letting repeat/serious criminals go same day. Both are often in cities with the most journalists and news too (NYC, LA) so it gets prominent coverage.
Those near daily videos of people robbing retail stores were shocking and rightfully so, I don't think I've seen anything like that in my adult life. So I don't blame people for being concerned that modern systems support that.
Regardless, as you said, doomers/media have always sold the world if going to shit narrative. I remember reading letters from 1500s where a famous English priest was saying the same stuff, which easily could have been a twitter thread in 2024. So I doubt that's very new. If anything the rhetoric has escalated.
I think what is new is that with demographic trends, crime and poverty have started to suburbanize. But to me, the places I have lived (inner cities) are generally much safer than they were in the 90s and early aughts growing up. Back then, people wouldn’t let their kids go play outside or at the local park because they might catch a stray bullet from a gang shooting; it’s not anywhere this bad yet.
Yes. I live in DC, which is a favorite punching bag for certain people and it’s eye-opening how few of the news stories mention two key details: the crime was mismanaged to the point where it lost accreditation and the prosecutors are federal appointees who don’t share priorities with or answer to the local government. There were so many doom-mongers going on about the city council, liberals, etc. without any mention of a multi-year disruption to any case requiring forensic analysis or even acknowledging that prosecutors were declining so many cases, much less discussing why.
It sold a ton of ad impressions, I’m sure, but had no value for improving the situation.
I can't find data past 2022, but the US incarceration rate rose by 2% from 2021 to 2022. Glad to see there's no correlation between the rate if violent crimes and the rate at which we lock people up.
NPR always does this. They tweak the valid criticism ever so slightly in attempt to invalidate it.
Americans don't believe that crime is down in general, they are narrowing it to violent crime. Car break-ins and thefts, identity theft, mail theft, shoplifting, opiods etc. are all rampant but aren't violent crime. Also the sources for the quoted study are dubious. They picked random sources that fit the narrative including an AM radio news site filled with scammy ads, and a local news station quoting unnamed police sources. The data is cherry-picked.
>The number of murders across the country surged by nearly 30% between 2019 and 2020, according to FBI statistics. The overall violent crime rate, which includes murder, assault, robbery and rape, inched up around 5% in the same period.
> But in 2023, crime in America looked very different.
Ok, fun fact, the 2023 murder count was still higher than the 2019 one.
Covid effects and restrictions caused an incredible surge in crime rate that has still not been recovered from, years later. That's the story.
The story isn't "things are great people are just delusional about crime rates" as NPR/left-wing bias wants to believe. Nor is it "things are worse than ever".
But you know what, this lying and manipulation by news sources is exhausting and ridiculous.
Show me a graph? Ope, things got ridiculous during covid and improved a lot but not all the way since then.
Violent crime is dropping much slower than it grew. If someone would shut up about their political biases one way or the other and actually portray the facts in an honest manner, maybe people would trust the news more and not have such wrong gut feelings.
EDIT: Props to Axios for an actual graph and a much more reasonable article which actually discusses the issue at hand.
At Level 1, this is obviously not true. For murders in particular, I would expect it to be especially not true. Murders are easy to count, so I would expect the data to be very accurate. While anecdotes about murders tend to be very newsworthy and so we read about them and might feel like they're more frequent when they are not.
But at Level 2, I do think there's a kernel of truth to this (Jeff's statement), because sometimes it is hard to measure the same thing that people actually mean when they are talking about something like crime.
For example, in this article: There are "two really visible crises" in the downtown area: homelessness and open-air drug use. "And honestly, people conflate that with crime, with street safety," she said."
So basically the author is saying people feel unsafe about homelessness and drug use, but those aren't really crimes (people "conflate" them with crimes), and so those don't count as higher crime. So people are mistaken about the crime rate. Fair enough, but that's a technicality of what we are actually measuring, VS what people are feeling about it when you ask them about "crime" or safety or something.
Just wanted to make sure I understand this right - Since Jeff B made that one statement, anecdotes are a better measure? And the second part of it talks about measurement, not data.
People are irrational and we give in to irrational fears. If I heard about one incidence of someone who is homeless attacking a bystander, I would be afraid of all homeless people. I do not have enough data to analyze (nor do I care to analyze) how many attacks have been by homeless vs others. My gut reaction drives the anecdotes and that is not always the reality.
I will give one point to this statement though - you cannot fight an emotional reaction with logic.
In most places, your car will almost never get broken into. In a few cities, this will happen basically all the time.
The averages are removing information about how crime is distributed and focusing on violent crime when people are more worried currently about property crime. This uneven distribution and the rise in property crime does a lot explain the difference between these national averages and people's personal experiences of crime.
While the plural of anecdote isn't data, it's not some mystery why people look at local temperatures to decide how to dress themselves, instead of the national average, nor are they statistically illiterate for doing so. Nobody with any sense is going outside in a blizzard without a coat just because the national average temperature is warm.
The same is true with crime. It is not evenly distributed and that variance defines people's lived experience with it.
Yes, but you are still looking at data. I never said there are no local variances. However, extreme dependence on your lived experience should not result in policy decisions.
I am taking a more extreme example just to illustrate - If I could not find a job, does not mean there are no jobs for anyone. If I face hardship, does not mean everyone faces hardship.
I am not saying ignore local variances.. however, it is still not anecdote driven. The original article was about crimes dropping in US measured across different cites and not that there is no crime.
My point is that people hearing about crime will still have an emotional reaction and might not reflect the reality. Anecdotes get tainted and exaggerated by emotions. JeffB's statement mean little in this case.
> The original article was about crimes dropping in US measured across different cites and not that there is no crime.
No, it was about violent crimes dropping and comparing that to a survey about people worried about all crime. Given that property crimes are infamously up in some places with mass looting events, those people are not being irrational or ignoring data to believe what they do.
The real data point we should worry about from a policy perspective is that there are a relatively small number of people who do a lot more crime than everyone else.
> Unless the survey was biased towards people living in areas of high crime, I am not sure how to draw the conclusion you drew.
You don't need any such bias to understand there's a difference between all crime & violent crime and that comparing the two measures of entirely different things is not valid.
> The last sentence seems to be a dog whistle for something else.
No, Jeff Bezos has it right. There is some nuance to his data analysis approach and I recommend listening to his interview on the Lex Fridman podcast to understand what he was getting at.
Even in the face of all the data look at the early comments in this thread. For some reason these individuals want you to believe there's this high level of crime. Blatantly ignoring the good trends and focusing on the outliers, in worse cases calling anecdotes better than facts. So strange and quite frankly weird as hell.
I know for a fact that since pandemic I've been threatened a bunch by bums and once minorly assaulted. None of that made it into the statistics as there's no point to reporting; the city council, the state legislature, and the DA are cool with me getting threatened and assaulted.
Foolish use of metrics is everywhere these days. Carefully consider what the facts you have mean.
There are also crime victimization surveys which, instead of counting reported crime, sample the population and ask which crimes the respondent have been victims of - the DOJ nationwide one doesn't seem to be out for 2023 yet.
The problem is that if one party is arguing that the other has fallen into McNamara's fallacy, they won't have the numbers to back it up and can always be written off as just anecdotal data and outliers.
No, that would be redundant. Moreover, it's a journalist's job to qualify their sources (in this case, official crime statistics), so implying some sort of discrepancy in that data without cause would itself be a form of gaslighting.
"A New York Police Department whistleblower's report that his precinct was systematically underreporting crime - an act that resulted in a suspension and time in a psychiatric ward - has been validated by an internal department investigation."
That's from 12 years ago, and moreover is not specific to violent crime, nor to national statistics. This article is about violent crime during and since the pandemic only.
And even if your NYC anecdote could somehow be applied to all national crime statistics, it still wouldn't change the truth of the article, which is that crime has decreased relative to before. If crime were underreported previously, and continues to be underreported now, then the fact of the relative decrease in rates remains true.
Or, the media is gaslighting people to think violent crime is up even if it’s not. Which is a rational possibility since reporting crime has political motivations.
The change over the last 2 years is disjointed from any demographic changes. Consider COVID changed the demographics in your favor, yet we still see decreasing violent crime
> A Gallup poll released in November found 77% of Americans believed there was more crime in the country than the year before. And 63% felt there was either a "very" or "extremely" serious crime problem — the highest in the poll's history going back to 2000.
Violent crime is going down. The survey was about overall crime. So the premise of this article is misleading.
The dichotomies presented make more sense if you accept that overall crime is up even if violent crime is down: Police numbers can't prevent murders but they can prevent break-ins - homeless camps don't put people into danger but they do help fence stolen goods. A lot of low-level crimes are not even being reported anymore.
I won't speak for everyone, but I don't really spend most of my days worried about getting murdered or assaulted. But I do spend a lot of time worried about getting robbed or having my car broken into (again!).