I was curious about some detail of the crime rate today so I pulled up data from the National Crime Victimization Survey. And I noticed something I never have before:
NCVS reports that about 10% of all households are victims of property crime. We normally think of this as home burglary, but it turns out that nearly all of it is "other theft," very little of which is serious enough to be reported to the police. This category includes shoplifting, pickpocketing, bicycle theft, and stealing stuff from cars. It's basically any theft that doesn't involve breaking into a building (burglary) or personal confrontation (robbery).
Ordinary home burglary is a tiny fraction of property victimization. What's more, it's dropped like a stone since its peak and has continued dropping over the past decade. Today, the average neighborhood has about one burglary every two years. Burglaries serious enough to notify the police happen about once every five years.¹
¹The median suburban subdivision has about 50 homes.
my bike was stolen from the garage the other week. i bought a new one and wow, was my old bike worn out. thank you criminal! also this is a good commuter bike for cheap https://bikesdirect.com/products/motobecane/gravel-bikes/gravel-v-vbrake-gravel-bikes.htm
As a kid while working the summer at the beach, I noticed an underground economy of bikes. People would steal them for a ride to work or a party. If it was available afterwards, great. If not, another theft was made.
What? Oh I walked everywhere (couldn't afford the gas even though I was bougie enough to have a car - gotta have a beer fund).
And yet about a third of Americans (just a guess) live in active fear of "Home Invasion" and feel a need to arm themselves to the teeth against this remote possibility. It's weird how common this fear is among a portion of our countrymen. Blame "if it bleeds it leads" and conservative demagoguing and who knows what but its not at all healthy for the believers in it nor our society.
I remember when I learned that these sorts of penny-ante crime are as nothing, compared to the massive toll exacted by "accounting control fraud" ("if you want to rob a bank, be the founder/owner!") And of course, wage theft.
The best trick Capital ever played was convincing you that the unwashed preyed upon us all...while its hand slipped into our pockets.
There was a time when the biggest crooks used fountain pens instead of knives or guns. Today they use computers.
Can't be right. All you have to do is look on Next Door and it is obvious that a home crime occurs several times a day.
Petty property crimes are considerably less frequent than burglary or robbery, but I don't think we should ignore the cumulative impact - the majority of households have experienced this at least once in the past ten years, perhaps, or certainly in the past 15 years. That makes them more willing to listen to "tough on crime" politicians.
And, of course, petty property crimes aren't distributed evenly. Someone living in a high-crime area is likely to experience one much more frequently than every ten years or so. And that very definitely changes one's view of how the world works, and what one believes is appropriate behavior.
All that is from the perspective of victim of crime. On the other side, consider a teenager whose peers have bikes or spending money or whatever, and the teenager doesn't. Isn't he/she sort of sucker to **not** steal things, considering how low the chances are of getting caught?
Hmm. Part of the decline is probably the general decline in crime, part of it is probably the ubiquity of cheap security cameras producing a deterrent.
Not everybody lives in the suburbs.