Over at Vox, Miles Bryan writes about a new study of crime in the downtown areas of New York, Philadelphia, Seattle, and Chicago. The study's conclusion? Actual crime has been pretty stable, but fear of crime has shot up. This, not a desire for remote work, is the biggest reason people give for not wanting to return to the office.
But why is fear of big-city crime so high in recent years? Bryan goes through several possibilities but somehow misses the obvious answer:
This should not be a surprise to anyone. If you marinated in Republican politics all day, you too would think that big cities have turned into hellholes under President Biden. Remember this?
Serious question: I have to go to New York soon and I'm trying to figure out where to stay. I have heard it's disgusting and violent there. But is it like Walking Dead Season 1 or Season 4?
— J.D. Vance (@JDVance1) July 11, 2021
Yuck yuck. And that's hardly the worst of it. To hear Fox News tell it, every city with a Democratic mayor is practically going up in flames. Only a fool would dare walk the streets of New York or LA.
But you hardly need any fancy studies to see that this just isn't true:
Roughly speaking, every city has its bad areas, and everyone knows where they are. Stay away from them and you'll be fine. This is not exactly new advice.
Several years ago, during downtime between jobs, I did a Kevin Drum mini project on crime. It had gone down and done so substantially where I grew up.
I then asked my parents about it, and you can guess their responses.
It’s remarkable how little we know about what we know.
I’ll admit that I was surprised at how much it’s dropped in the last 20 years.
It is very controversial within my family for me to let my fifteen-year-old walk half a mile to the library, on streets with sidewalks in a semi-rural semi-exurban county seat.
It's sad and telling that the Republican Party, and especially MAGA, are almost exclusively pitching fear these days. Crime, immigrants, "the children", inflation, trans, they are completely irrational and untethered.
Marjorie Greene and George Santos are the new and trending faces of the Republican Party, and all of us on the know see that as a recipe for disaster and losing, but they just can't face the facts.
Consider the children and their futures when it comes to laying down for Putin and the Saudis, climate change, nuclear mismanagement (humans can't manage things for hundreds of years, let alone have a stable civilization), and so on.
For once, really consider the children, who need hope not fear.
>>>It's sad and telling that the Republican Party, and especially MAGA, are almost exclusively pitching fear these days.<<<
These days?
Hubris still afflicts us, and not just the Republican MAGA folk, we have a tendency to think of ourselves as gods, overestimating our capabilities and forgetting the fractured and violent history that is human politics, when we are really the sorcerer's apprentices.
If we start with that awareness however, we can soberly move forward, embracing hope and further securing human rights and liberties against elite deviance and corruption, which is an everpresent threat.
The murder rate in NYC spiked in 2020, with some improvements in 2021 and 2022. We have had the good fortune of declining murder rates in the past 2 decades, but in 2020, it spiked up to around the rate in 2011. Seems that NYC has a significantly lower murder rate than most major cities in the US.
https://abc7ny.com/feature/new-york-safety-tracker-crime-stats-how-safe-is-my-neighborhood-zip-code-statistics/12352050/
Every local news channel starts with about 10+ minutes of crime stories and other terrible tragedies. It had a significant impact on the region and local politics, impacting the NYC mayors race, and the 2022 midterms and NY Governors race. Notwithstanding that the NYC suburbs and upstate areas were far less effected by increased crime, the GOP used the fear of crime, along with the recent changes in cash bail laws to do far better than expected in 2022, probably resulting in GOP congressional wins in swing districts that Biden won, and a much closer governors race than expected.
Yes irrational fear of crime, from people who never go there. Bail reform was stupid and to compound it, now the Gov wants force building in suburbs that a- do not have the space and B- do not want local zoning over turned. Does not matter if you think it’s good policy, it is hideous politics. Yes NYC elects the Ds but they can’t elect all the Assembly or Senate. The Ds cannot be seen as hostile to the suburbs. That is where the college educated voters live. The other constituency to the D party. All the Rs have to do is run a moderate or a hidden Trumper alla Santos and they can win.
I can't speak to the precise details of the bail reform initiative you speak of but bail is a horrible, racist, classist, and antiquated system and should have gone out with locking someone in stocks on the town square.
Many years ago I was on a jury for a case of misdemeanor “under the influence”. The evidence was crap and we quickly voted not guilty. The guy had been in county jail for 9 months because he was unable to make bail.
Yes for non violent first time offenders it’s awful. For violent and repeat felony offenders I’m all for it. Smart prosecutorial discretion would help. Bragg not the smartest there
I think one thing contributing to the hyperventilation over crime in cities is that so much more of it is captured on video now -- either security cameras, dash cams, or people's phones -- that it's easier than ever for news orgs to get their hands on the footage and use it in their never-ending "if it bleeds, it leads" style of journalism. When people see an image, of, say, someone snatching a woman's purse on the subway, that's going to register differently than a small notice in the newspaper on page B22. If that would even get *into* a newspaper back in the day.
I was in the NYC area over the weekend and it was beautiful and I wasn't attacked by armed zombies or anything. Go figure!
The crime in NYC is totally BS. Unfortunately, the Faux-ite’s are fearful Toolbags. My sons live there and have detected no changes and still love it. I go in every other week and have no fear. Ridiculous.
Yet, ostensibly liberal/Democratic cities are turning away from their lefter-leaning Mayors. For example, Chicago turning Lightfoot loose.
One would not expect those voters to be putting stock in Fox et al.
Lightfoot is is rather a special case though, isn't she? Basically she's out because she picked a lot of fights she didn't need to.
I'm not from Chicago, but my impression, too, is that she basically spent most of her term pissing off a bunch of people she didn't need to with her imperious management style. She didn't seem to be a "soft on crime"-type necessarily, but again, I'm not in Chicago, so I'm going by what I read in the national media.
It will be very interesting to see whether Vallas or Johnson prevails.
It's not just Fox though. As others pointed out, the local TV news is a constant bloodbath. In Seattle, the local paper is on a jihad against the left City Council and uses every opportunity to trumpet the "crime wave" to blame them for conditions downtown.
>> conditions downtown<<
I think a lot of fear of street crime is associated with homelessness in the city. My wife and I drove along the Embarcadero in San Francisco recently. In a nice downtown area along the waterfront some homeless person had basically built a house on the sidewalk with plywood walls and a patio umbrella for a roof. That person might be totally harmless but when people see something like that, along with dozens of tents and makeshift tents, it instills fear. Who wants to walk in such an area?
In regards to your comment, I would invite our intrepid Blogger to give his thoughts on the homeless that inhabit Paris ( to coincide with the daily pic ).
My thought is that definitely it's an eyesore, but fear? I've seen encampments next to Waikiki ( I believe the Queen insisted that the People could live on land not yet claimed as she "abdicated" ), encampments under overpasses/junctions, huts in parks, cars in public places as homes...just people trying to exist. If it were dangerous, the Blue Boys would have long before taken care of it. Just have to remind yourself.
Everybody hates it, and maybe fears it, but doesn't want to pay to fix it.
>> Despite the poll’s findings, violent crime rates in the city for robbery, burglary and some property offenses have fallen below already-low pre-Covid levels. But experts say people often unfairly link homelessness and poverty to an uptick in crime—even though data doesn’t support a connection between the two.<<
https://sfstandard.com/criminal-justice/poll-crime-and-homelessness-are-linked-in-the-minds-of-san-franciscans/
There are different kinds of fear. You may not fear being robbed or hurt by homeless people, but you might fear being aggressively panhandled by them, or stepping in their feces or other gross stuff on the sidewalk near an active encampment, or interacting with disturbed or mentally ill people.
Bottom line, parks, vacant lots, and sidewalks are not really set up for people to live on/in. Our society is fundamentally failing in this area and the current system of just letting the homeless do more or less as they please and not actually trying to provide them homes is not a solution.
As somebody that used to work near the Embarcadero and still lives in the city, you can fear all that stuff but the blathering about the problem far exceeds the reality. Yes, it doesn't look good but the homicide rate is a bout 1/2 what it used to be 20 years ago. My greatest fear walking around SF by far is getting hit by a car while in a crosswalk. I've had too many near misses to count.
Why would you fear an enterprising and obviously crafty homeless person like that? Rather than being afraid, you should instead be thinking "there but for the grace of God (or cosmic luck) go I".
You know, despite all the back-to-the-office charts, I can see with my own eyes that downtown is still half empty, and retailers want to blame the homeless for that.
Certainly, in our hyper partisan political climate, crime is going to be very polarized. Further, the GOP is actively using the perception of crime, phrases like defund the police, as a political wedge issue.
My only offset was that the BLM protests were featured on TV, and social media, for months: some locations did have violence, property damage etc. The videos of the violent acts were shown over and over. IF one opposed BLM ideologically (the GOP), might crime be the large element of these events that lingers in the mind?
Despite national crime stats, there is also a tribal perception of the types of crime and associated hazards: R's are afraid of "general lawlessness" and anything that might be ethnic, while a lot of D's are convinced the police murder black people at insane rates, there is a wave of anti-asian violence and that there is an acceleration in the rate of violence against your favorite oppressed group.
In both cases it leads to bad policy and outcomes.
When Covid hit, there were less people to target in downtown areas, so some of the crime moved to where the money was--"safe" areas and suburbs. Not a ton of crime, but even the smallest bit sparks fear. That's not supposed to happen here!!!
There were the occasional "flash mob" robberies in wealthy areas too. That seems to have died down, but memory lives on.
Crime overall is down--but guns are everywhere and we're more attuned to mass shootings.
It's amazing that cities are allegedly hellholes and yet the housing in the largest ones haven't come down in price. At all. It's almost as if the people actually living in cities realize that - despite murders being at a 10-year high or Whatever Scary Thing Is On Fox News Right Now - cities are generally way better than they were in the 1970-1995 period.
I agree with other commenters here: it's not crime or even "crime," it's the visible homelessness. Before, the homeless were shunted away from public sight, so comfortable suburbanites and Good Christian Rural Folk didn't encounter them much. Now, the homeless are allowed to stay in place long enough to build semi-permanent structures, and this gives the suburbanites and rural folk the heebie-jeebies.
Cities really do need to deal with their homeless populations. Letting them just sprawl all over public property does make everybody else's lives (including housed city residents) more sad and frustrating... even if it doesn't actually have any noticeable effect on crime stats. Disorder does turn off pretty much everyone except the absolute bleedingest hearts among us.
Anyone who complains about the homeless disturbing their bliss or touristy beautitude is a douche, plain and simple. Show some humanity and concern about why these homeless people are driven to these "depths".
The whole white-collar consumerist mentality is becoming tiring, and is a symptom of a much more profound disengagement from actual reality.
Your assumption that people who don't like the current system of just letting mentally ill people, drug addicts, or just folks who are very down on their luck build shanty towns in public spaces don't care about these people is flawed. Letting the homeless build shanty towns and shaming everyone to just ignore them and go about their business is not a good solution to the homeless problem. I'm surprised you think it is.
The Nextdoor app is also being leveraged by GOP operatives to amp up the fear of crime and woe unto anyone who dares question the motives of our kindly neighbors who just want to keep us informed. Nevermind that crime is down in Virginia but for domestic violence, catalytic converter theft and everyone's ring camera capturing "suspicious" people in the dark of night.
You too? My parner's sister had her catalytic converter stolen last April. In an (upper-echelon) employees only parking lot with camera surveillance.
Nobody's touched my car but I work from home and have noisy dogs and It's not a Prius or another popular car for theft. But the Hondas and the Prius are sitting ducks in suburbia in neighborhoods where they aren't parked in garages.
Four wheel drive trucks are another easy target. Sitting high up in the air makes it easier to cut their converters off. My former company had to put in a card key controlled gate to keep the converter thrives out of the employee parking lot.
"... everyone knows where they are. .."
Everybody does not know where they are. Every so often you hear about a tourist getting into trouble because they didn't know to stay out of an area.
"Roughly speaking, every city has its bad areas, and everyone knows where they are. Stay away from them and you'll be fine. .."
Safest just to stay out of the city altogether.
Every city has good areas, which you are missing. But if you like the suburbs or the country better, so be it. Just don’t assume the crime rate is lower there.
Safest just to stay out of the city altogether
Plenty of rural locations in the US are more dangerous than quite a few of our cities. If you really want to be safe, stay out of the red states, especially the Old Confederacy.
This assessment is insane. First the "drop in crime" here isn't about the number of crimes but the *share* of crimes in downtown vs the rest of the city. So if crime is up 100% in downtown but up 120% in the rest of the city, Figure 3 would show a decline. No one cares about that. People care about the absolute level of crime. If violent crime is up people will care more about their safety. If someone lives in a safe neighborhood (either a within the city or a suburb), they can be perfectly justified in fearing for their safety if violent crime has increased in downtown even if it is proportional to the rest of the city.
In my hometown of Seattle, shootings have more than doubled from 2019. Last year there were 53 murders (52 by some counts) while the 10 year average is 31.5 (68% increase -- and would be higher if that was from the average of the 10 years 2010-2019). Therefore based on Figure 3, it is reasonable to assume that shootings and murders in downtown Seattle have also increased dramatically and thus it is perfectly rational to fear for your safety.
it is reasonable to assume that shootings and murders in downtown Seattle have also increased dramatically and thus it is perfectly rational to fear for your safety.
As Kevin noted, all cities have their more dangerous areas. Seattle is the only major one I can think of where areas immediately adjacent to the CBD are some of the scariest precincts. Perhaps there others.
New Orleans has some very statistically dangerous areas not far from the Quarter.
Over the last four years people have seen a lot of videos of theft: smash-and-grab or shoplifters-just-walking-past-security. I'm convinced that's had a major impact on the perception of rising crime. Those images were rare a decade ago.
Often those crimes are in cities which treat shoplifting and non-violent theft as misdemeanors. Often without cash bail, prosecution, or if deemed guilty, any jail time (decarceration). Those cities are overwhelmingly Democratic.
Why do you think D.A. Chesa Boudin was recalled in liberal San Francisco? It wasn't because of a rise in violent crime. It was because there was an eruption of theft, burglaries, vandalism, and open-air drug dealing. People saw that taking place once a week on the local news.
Nonetheless the perception of rampant property crime—or any type of lawlessness, really—will make people feel less safe and secure.
Personal perception of crime comes down to a few factors. Rural folks often can't differentiate between urban neighborhoods, so murders concentrated in a single neighborhood often make them think the entre city is a dangerous hell hole. Urban dwellers often laugh at this.
But city folks often change their perception of crime levels based on how likely they are to be a victim of it. Increased catalytic converter thefts and skyrocketing thefts of some Kias and Hyndais has really changed the view of crime risk for many city dwellers. Other crimes that particularly worry city dwellers in "safe" neighborhoods are mass shootings in public places, crime on public transport, crime in schools and rec centers, carjackings, increased muggings at grocery stores/pharmacies, and publicly intoxicated homeless in entertainment districts (mostly women worry about this, because it usually means an increase in street harassment/gropings).
It is easy for the urban middle class to avoid "certain" streets or neighborhoods late at night (or always, which is often the case). It is much harder to be a Kia driver with no garage, an elderly person buying groceries, or an office worker who takes the bus when the crimes come to you.
"Roughly speaking, every city has its bad areas, and everyone knows where they are. Stay away from them and you'll be fine. This is not exactly new advice."
I have had occasion to walk through some bad parts of Baltimore. I never felt any great concern. I am physically large, male, and very white. I might have to fend off a half-hearted hustle attempt, but the denizens look at someone like me and understand that if they tried anything serious, the police would actually care and make trouble. I won't necessarily try this at night, but in daylight? Avoid the guys who are strung out. They tend to exercise poor judgment. But otherwise? No problem.
s/crime/racism/ or s/crime/rape/ or s/crime/hatecrime/
Both sides do it.
The only difference is what trivialities are magnified by the particular side.
Kevin writes: "[Fear of crime], not a desire for remote work, is the biggest reason people give for not wanting to return to the office.
But why is fear of big-city crime so high in recent years?"
Kevin says then it's politics. But how about the simpler explanation that people need an excuse to not go back to the office and work remote???