Here's the latest meme on the right:
Crime is not down. Crime reporting is. pic.twitter.com/9NBgNI1LXk
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) June 13, 2024
Sigh. Are you interested in a deep-in-the-weeds explanation of how crime is reported and summarized in the US? Sure, why not.
For many years the FBI used a crime-reporting system called SRS. But in 2016, after years of testing, they finally announced that they would switch to a substantially improved system called NIBRS by 2021. And they did. Not every police department was ready on time, but the participation level has been rising every year:
About 71% of all police department now submit crime data via NIBRS. Among the 15 largest cities, all are up and running—including New York City—except for Los Angeles and Jacksonville. Both will complete the transition later this year.
In addition, the FBI allows non-NIBRS agencies to report old-school SRS data, which is reformatted and then used to estimate crime in nonreporting cities. So the total agency coverage of the FBI's dataset is actually about 84%.
Now, the old SRS system had about 95% agency coverage, so the coverage of the current system is still lower than it used to be. However, as you might expect, the statisticians in the Department of Justice are keenly aware of this and spent years developing a set of sophisticated methods to estimate the full total. There are several issues they've had to address, and the biggest one is all those missing agencies. Here's how they do it:
To account for nonreporting agencies—those agencies which have not reported any information through NIBRS during the year—a statistical weight is applied to the reporting agencies. A statistical weight is a number allowing the reporting agencies to represent both themselves and some portion of the nonreporting agencies. Statistical weights are designed in such a way that reporting agencies represent nonreporting agencies who have similar agency characteristics, such as agency size and agency type.
Got that? If Peoria is missing,¹ they give a greater weight to a few similar neighboring cities in order to make up for it. The idea is that crime is likely to be nearly the same in places that are nearby and the same size, so you can use those places to create an estimate for the nonreporting city. Some of the estimates will be off, but if you do thousands of them it mostly evens out.
The upshot of all this is (a) participation is growing and nearly all big cities are now on board, and (b) the FBI's model accounts for missing cities and makes up for it. The NIBRS transition in 2021 was pretty messy, but since then the kinks have mostly been worked out and the current data is very reliable. Not perfect, but pretty good. If they say crime is down, then crime is down.
¹It's not. They are fully operational on NIBRS.
Given that the right would shamelessly put out shoddy numbers that fit their talking points they think everyone else would too. To them, both sides are playing that same game, so they might as well go with the lies they prefer rather than what they believe are lies they don't like.
The tendency to seek errors in statistics you disagree with is to a considerable extent a both sides game. Whether it be unemployment rates or crime rates or covid infection rates or public opinion polls or votes or any other meaningful statistic, there are always people who will insist that the numbers are wrong because they don't support the prevailing narrative.
This tendency seems to crop up more often among RWNJs, but I suspect that's because "reality has a well known liberal bias" rather than because leftists have more respect for the hard numbers. There are just more numbers that RWNJs want to dispute.
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Someone should point out to that troll that since 84% of agencies submit their information (including virtually all the big cities), he must think there's a lot of crime happening in conservative small towns and rural areas that Republicans aren't doing much about!
Or don't, since he gets paid when you engage with the tweet in any way. Screenshot it for debunking in your own post, and then mute* him.
* You can block him as well, but I have this weird hunch that Musk is doing sweeping "unblockings" of conservative accounts he likes over time. I swear I've seen people popup in my For You feed that I've blocked.
There *IS* a lot of crime happening in conservative small towns and rural areas. Meth, oxy, grift, corruption, domestic violence, etc.
Mostly, blocking has its limits. I sometimes see posts from people who have blocked me, even though it's not supposed to show them. I assume that the filter is just overwhelmed.
Blocking on Twitter is, for all practical purposes, worthless. I constantly see accounts on the site and when I go to block them, see that I already have.
My weekly meeting of the Conspiracy to Make Conservatives Look Bad had to be scrubbed at the last minute because some wingnut started calling around asking why the football stadium was all lit up when it isn't even football season.
They're getting suspicious.
No worries. Crime will go back up. This is why we need immigration. It will give jobs to foreign criminals. ????
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/tren-de-aragua-venezuelan-gang-members-slip-into-us-rcna156290
Mr. Drum should tell this Mayor he doesn’t need to do this. Crime is down! It can’t be a problem in Akron.
The Mayor announced that the City has partnered with Akron Community Foundation to create the Gun Violence Response Fund. “This is about providing support to victims. Throughout this process we are all learning more about the victim assistance infrastructure and learning about how we can better support it,” says Mayor Shammas Malik. He says gun violence is a huge problem in Akron. The fund will help victims with things like medical bills, funeral costs, and daily expenses if they can not return to work. “This specific fund is something for our community to rally around to help the victims of this tragedy we are dealing with,” says Malik.
Here are 1000 plus unreported crimes in just one place on one day!
https://nypost.com/2024/06/13/us-news/long-beach-chaos-1-shot-teens-twerk-on-cop-cars/
One person was shot in Long Beach on Long Island Thursday evening as a massive, rowdy crowd of teenagers overtook the beach during “senior skip day,” according to police sources. A swarm of over 2,000 high school seniors cut class and converged on the Nassau County beach and the scene quickly devolved into mayhem by 6 p.m. The shenanigans included a fight, gunfire and students twerking on a police car, according to sources and video from the scene.
Out of control teenage parties aren't the sort of crime most people are afraid of-- they're a nusiance, but hardly the Return Of Bonnie and Clyde.
That shooting is obviously not an "unreported crime" as you yourself are infiormed about it-- therefore it was somehow publicized, not ignored.
Obviously, there are lots of unreported crimes, and always have been. Do you have any information that the non-report rate has changed recently?
didn't Nassau county go for Trump in 2020?
Justin, were you the guy I saw on the bus the other night having a discussion with himself?
You can't just point at a bunch of crimes and say "here's some unreported crimes", you have to confirm that they actually are unreported.
"students twerking on a police cars"
That must have really frightened you. Did mommy rock you to sleep?
Reminded me of the John Lott thing a month and a half ago, addressed by Kevin and FactCheck.org.
I can’t think of a single time where people thought the crime rate was going down.
Agreed. I once graded an essay* by a college student who casually referenced "as crime rates continue to skyrocket", or some such. I was amused, but also disheartened, to note that the crime rate in the US had actually been dropping throughout his entire lifetime.
*(Yes, I'm a math guy, but I have occasionally taught interdisciplinary courses that touch on other areas.)
Was the meme the result of intellectual laziness or intellectual dishonesty? Someone ought to track this account.
This account has a racist name. Of course it!s wrong and dishonest.
They can't seem to explain why underreporting wasn't also happening in previous reporting periods.
Because if it was, then the claim of lower crime remains true.
Right? Just because some places aren't reporting doesn't mean that the stats from agencies that do report are wrong.
Science is not their thing. They've made that clear for years now.
Science is, among other things, a mechanism for the resolution of disputes. And what is the MAGA movement other than a dismantling of all dispute resolution mechanisms that they can't control or that don't systemically favor them? Of course, since these mechanisms are the basis of society, the dismantling will continue until there is only one left - the application of raw force.
How can this be true? People are still seeing violent crime on their TV's, especially on local news! Granted, they now get feeds from across the country....
Crime is down, but gun violence and mass shootings are still too high. And you'll still see videos of people busting into a business with a car, then making off with the standalone ATM.
Oh great--bump stocks are back....
Shorter Supreme Court: “if it looks like a machine gun, sounds like a machine gun, and shoots like a machine gun, while that doesn’t mean it’s a machine gun.
Who are you going to believe!? Kevin or lying Donald Trump?