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Here’s the boring truth: Crime is neither up nor down

Published on 10 Comments on Here’s the boring truth: Crime is neither up nor down

Paul Krugman put up this Gallup chart today with the comment "Crime is way down; Ds are right":

In reality, this chart shows that nobody is right. Here's the actual crime trend since the start of the century:

Violent crime dropped steadily through 2012 and has been flat ever since. Property crime dropped through 2020 and has since been flat. Compared to the previous year, there was essentially no change in 2023.¹

So in the most recent few years crime hasn't gone down, but that's largely because crime never went up in the first place. Murder did, but that's all.

At the same time, big majorities of both Democrats and Republicans thought crime was up from about 2005 through 2015 even though it was declining steadily the whole time.

The media does an absolute crap job of covering crime, and that's not even counting the deliberate misinformation peddled by the likes of Fox News. Every upward blip gets big headlines. "If it bleeds" still leads local news broadcasts around the country. Social media sites like Nextdoor amp up the fear even more.

Obviously I can't fight that. But for those who care, (a) crime is way down over the long term, and (b) nothing much has happened over the short term. Since 2020, crime is neither up nor down.

¹There's some early evidence that crime has dropped substantially so far in 2024, but it's too early to say for sure.

POSTSCRIPT: In case you're curious, here's the trend in the murder rate. It spiked up temporarily in 2020 but is now back down. Recent evidence suggests it's down even more in 2024.

10 thoughts on “Here’s the boring truth: Crime is neither up nor down”

  1. zic

    My first editor told me, "If it bleeds, it leads."

    So of course the press does a bad job of covering it; it's all out of proportion to any other important news (or completely unreported. This is often the case, particularly with white-collar and environmental crimes.)

  2. Austin

    So by your own charts, property crime continues to fall from 2001-today, with a single uptick in 2022 that was reversed by 2023... and violent crime fell from 2001-2014, then flatlined for a decade to today... and somehow all of this means that nobody is right when they say "crime has fallen" or "crime has risen." Methinks the former group is righter than the latter group... but sure, bothsides it for us, Kevin.

    2. jdubs

      This is correct. This is a stupid 'both sides but with CHARTS!'.

      Kevins response is silly. People cant respond to any of type of 'over the past x time period' type of survey and be expected to perfectly remember their memories or the change in a situatiomn but only starting at a precise random date in the past.

      Crime is down, murder is down. This isnt complicated, bit the urge to BOTHSIDES runs deep for some people.

  5. bharshaw

    A tad misleading I think, to lump all crime into one graph line. I suspect murder is the crime most worrisome to the public and what they think of first when polled about "crime".

    Polling would be better if it split out the different categories. But that's a dream, not reality.

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