Criminologist John Pfaff brings this chart to our attention today:
There are a couple of things to notice. First, people always think that crime is worse overall than it is in their own neighborhood. Second, in 2020 perceptions of local crime went down while perceptions of overall crime went up.
It's not hard to figure out what happened in 2020. Basically, perceptions of neighborhood crime—i.e., crime that people know about firsthand—didn't change much. But an endless Fox News focus on the crime associated with George Floyd protests convinced a lot of people that America's cities were aflame. It was never really true, but on TV it sure looked true.
This is all part of a continuing perception that you take your life in your hands if you visit an American city. I've gotten this reaction a surprising number of times from friends who are sort of startled if I tell them I'm going up to LA. "Isn't that dangerous?" And this is LA in the middle of the day. It's not special pleading to say that it's not even remotely dangerous. But a surprising number of people don't know this.
I blame TV in general, Fox News in particular, and long memories that go back to an era when big cities actually were dangerous in certain areas. Obviously you shouldn't be an idiot, and there are certainly sketchy places that anyone with sense would avoid at night. But downtown areas in general in the daytime? Mostly they're no more dangerous than your local shopping mall.
This is not exactly Fox News, it's more human nature/stupidity and the desire to tell an exciting story.
Is it dangerous to visit, I don't know, Yangon in Myanmar? Well sure, it sounds dangerous if all you know about the place is footage of political protests, or the (really bad) Rambo 4 movie, or vague confusion about whether The Hangover Pt II happened in Bangkok or Yangon.
Is it more dangerous to visit Bogota? Or Lagos? Or Johannesburg? Well, of course depends on what you are doing there, but one can look at numbers -- or one can rely on vague impressions.
Or from a different angle, what's life like in the "third world". No matter how many elephant graphs are drawn and how many talks Hans Rosling gives, people (many of them people who angrily agree with you about Fox News) are convinced they know the answer, they don't need facts confusing them.
Or, third angle: it's always the girls of the other who are "the sure thing". If you're in the US it's Swedish girls. In Sweden it's Russian girls. In Russia it's Chinese girls. In China it's US girls. And so the circle of hope among teenage males.
People are lazy, people are stupid, people are ignorant. Fox News has tapped into that for some purposes, but they didn't create people that way, and it's not only Fox News viewers who are that way.
Well, George Floyd used a counterfeit twenty, there's your rising crime right there! Just kidding, but then again, who knows what shapes people's thinking?
Real question. Has that ever been established? I know he was accused of it. How did the person know? Did it have a picture of Davey Crockett?
One of the things I found weird about Floyd’s arrest was that there was no questioning of him by the police when they first approached him. If I was accused of buying something with a counterfeit $20 my expectation would be that the police would talk to me first, not just walk up and arrest me.
Yes, he was a addict.
well then of course he deserved to die the most horrible death imaginable. but then, being an addict myself (two cups of coffee each morning) i really don't examine the currency i receive it as change or get it from a bank. and even if i did, i wouldn't wouldn't know what to look for unless the portrait is of bozo the clown or donald trump (hard to tell those two apart). i'm guessing most people are pretty much the same, including you. and funny thing: it's only a crime to pass counterfeit if you do so knowingly as determined in a court of law and not by a thug on the street wearing a police officer's uniform.
Many years ago I bought cheeseburger with a counterfeit twenty. A few minutes later as I walked down the street, I was approached by a policeman who asked me, very politely, "could I have a few words with you?"
"Sure, officer, how can I help you?"
"Well sir, I think you spent this twenty dollar bill in Gino's a few minutes ago. Is that correct?"
"Gee officer, I did spend a twenty at Gino's, but y'know, all twenties look pretty much the same, so I couldn't tell you if that's the one. But how can I help you?"
"Well sir, the counter man identified you as the customer who gave him this twenty, and it turns out to be counterfeit. I'll have to ask you to come back to Gino's for just a moment so we can get this squared away."
"Sure officer, but let's try not to take too long; I have to get back to work."
"You bet, sir, I'll try to keep it brief."
We walked back to Gino's, the counterman pointed to me and blurted out, "That's the one; he's the one who gave me the bogus bill."
"Take it easy, son," said the policeman, "we've got this under control."
The policeman asked me where I got the twenty. I told him it came out of a cash flow machine, so that was a dead end. He explained that I had to give back the seventeen dollars and change I had received. I cried the blues, but of course that's the rule, so I gave it back. The policeman asked me for my name and address and phone number in case anything came up that might give them a lead. I gave it to him, and that was the end of that.
This conversation was an illustration of several things:
(1) Two calm adults handled an uncomfortable situation in a mature manner.
(2) The policeman accorded me what may have been "white privilege," or perhaps simply the cop's rational reaction to an unwilling "customer" who responded calmly and cooperated. I'll never know.
(3) And considering the alternative scenario that could have occurred, it surely illustrates the truism that "fight or flight" is NOT the totality of options.
Did they say what it was about the bill that alerted the counterman immediately?
They didn't say and I didn't ask. At the time, I assumed they had passed it under an UV light (what they used to call "black light") but that was just an assumption; I didn't confirm it. Basically, I knew I was screwed, and I didn't suspect it was high-tech Dick Tracy detective work, so I lost twenty bucks and my life went on.
An evil mind at work. Maybe the counterman was short a 20 in his register? Used you as a way of making up the short with out getting his pay docked? Showed cop proof of counterfeit with your fingerprints on it? Interesting.
"my expectation would be that the police would talk to me first, not just walk up and arrest me."
That expectation accompanied with the just world bias is why many people blame the victim instead of the powerful government gun wielding enforcers. People can either accept that the idea of a just world where Government armed agents are doing good is a fantasy or pretend that the people killed and harmed by the government are to blame. The telling par tis that conservatives are the ones literally unquestioningly defending the government murdering people.
Government feeding people = tyranny and government overreach.
Government killing people = freedom and prosperity.
Counterfeit money (unless maybe it's very high quality) isn't that hard to catch. I caught a couple when I worked at convenience store in college. However it isn't clear that Floyd, even if he tendered the counterfeit bill, should have been presumed guilty of being the counterfeiter. He could have easily accepted it as money from someone else. Something which could happen to anyone-- and I know people who have ended up with bad bills quite innocently.
Are you doing a social Triptych this morning? All three are built around strengthening boundaries between the in group and everyone else.
But Kevin, come on! Those big cities are just full ... well, you know, those people. I mean, they don't call them "inner city" people for no reason! And you know how they are! Just look at all that crime! And all that tax money that gets spent there! And if they didn't like it, why don't they just move? No sir, *I* know what those cities are like! I see it on TV all the time.
I live in Baltimore and some people I know in parts distant are appalled at the idea. They seem amazed I haven't ended up on a morgue slap already. But really, it's no different from driving on a highway with bad curves and blind corners and a history of wrecks-- or going into a wildness area where there are bears, rattlesnakes and the like. You behave with appropriate caution and it becomes ingrained in you.
Fox News is irrelevant. A lot of people up north think the South is full of moral degenerates. Your neighborhood is always the cool one.
North? South?? The WORLD is full of moral degenerates. So what's new??
BTW, I think your neighborhood and mine might be the last two cool ones. And I'm not so sure about yours.
On my last visit there I discovered the South is not full of moral degenerates. Many wonderful people there. OTOH, the South is full of people who vote for moral degenerates. That's the problem.
I don't know anything about LA, but homicides in New York have risen something like 50% over the past two years. There have been two shootings near my office (in Times Square) this year. So my neighborhood crime is definitely up, and if that leads suburbanites to say that crime in their neighborhood is stable, but crime overall is up, then they are correct.
Now if you want to make the silly argument that the decline in residential burglaries outweighs the increase in homicides, go ahead. Residential burglaries don't lead the evening news.
Murders in NYC are down slightly this year compared to last year (304 vs 307). They were actually up through May (189 vs 149), but are down considerably for June through August (115 vs 158).
If homicides to date are the same as last year (I consider 307 to be the same as 304), then that is a 45% increase from 2019. (319 in 2019, 468 in 2020.) If suburban TV viewers are hesitant to extrapolate from the June to August numbers, I join them. It was a rainy summer.
Obligatory link: https://youtu.be/zDAmPIq29ro
Down certainly appears on the chart, but it wasn’t “much” and we have nothing about error margins, so do we really know it went down or just reflecting the inherent noise in the data?
The dangerous, evil cities meme feeds into the culture wars. People who live in cities are moral degenerates, drug addicts, sexual perverts ... in a word, DEMOCRATS. Whereas, we, the rural population, are good and decent Christian people, the backbone of America, the only true Americans. Just like Donald Trump.
A different form of obligatory link, from four months ago: https://jabberwocking.com/why-is-the-murder-rate-up-so-much/
That Kevin, hysterically overreacting to what he sees on Fox News. (/sarc, for those too dim to detect it)
Violent crime rates by county,
https://old.reddit.com/r/Fuckthealtright/comments/kmjm2s/violent_crime_rates_by_county_seems_to_be_a/
Red states are way more violence prone than other areas, so it may not be absolutely true that Fox is the exclusive driver in this, but that social conservatives are inherently violent and assume and expect violence in others.
" but that social conservatives are inherently violent and assume and expect violence in others."
Social conservative policies inherently cause violence. A culture that spends it time yelling about how half the population needs to be oppressed (women, gays, racial minorities, religious minorities) is one that breeds a peaceful safe society.
They expect violence in others because one natural response to being oppressed and attacked is to fight back. Conservatives fear the groups they've spent hundreds of years torturing will respond in kind.
There's that, and it goes back a lot further than that.
Most of their outlook is founded on scarcity of resources, so an inherent strategy for them is to try to pre-cripple anyone they can to degrade the competition.
This is why a society where scarcity is lessening panics them.
If they can't control the scarcity, they can't control their victims, and it sends them into an anxiety fueled existential crisis.
This is why revolutions classically break out in circumstances where things have actually been improving, but where other forces of social conservatism act strongly against the improvement, or the sense of improvement.
Not quite. The South is way more violent than any other region. The red states of the Plains and Mountain regions aren't particularly violent; in fact they are less violent than California, which is very blue. I'm pretty sure a regression analysis will find essentially no correlation between party and crime rate at the state level.
Local news programs from practically all TV stations, whether affiliated with a network or not, contribute to the misperception of the amount of crime that occurs locally and nationally.
"If it bleeds, it leads!"
Chicago ("Chi-raq") says: "Hold my deep dish..."
Krowe is from Detroit. We've been dealing with being thought of as crime central since the seventies. On my first vacation out-of-state, folks asked if I carried a gun for protection when they found out where I was from.
"Kentucky Fried Movie" went there before Fox was a pup....
Modern journalism,
https://old.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/pke96y/modern_journalism_in_a_nutshell/
You might blame the media in general for the general erroneous perception that crime is always increasing, but there is no evidence in this chart that Fox News or even cable news is responsible for any increase in this perception (there has been none in the perception of local crime) nor that the difference between national and local crime has increased. That difference actually decreased from the early 90's when in fact crime was higher than it is now and most of the excess was in the inner cities. The difference has remained about the same since Fox News was founded in 1996.
This has been another lesson in how not to interpret charts.
There could be an influence of Fox (and other media) in the most recent (rather small) upturn of perception of national crime, but there are other possible reasons, such as an actual increase in murder and the real rioting and looting, which got on all the media.
If it bleeds, it leads...
Gun crime (read homicides) has increased a lot recently, but most other violent crime has dropped. Still not as bad as the 70's and 80's relatively speaking, though a few places are surprisingly close (haven't checked latest numbers).
There's a lot more people in cities, so more total crime even if lower percentage overall. So more news....
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/30/us-crime-rate-homcides-explained
If it bleeds, it leads. I do find that the local Fox station is particularly good at following that quote. But mainstream media instinct far behind. Two main drivers, IMHO. One: the speed of news and two: the lack of in-depth reporting. In the 1900s, it took weeks for news to travel across the country, in the 1960s (think Vietnam era), a day or two to get the film across the ocean. Today? Two minutes. It takes two minutes...or less..for all the tragedies of the world to reach us. As a species we have not yet evolved to deal with this constant level of stress. And so crime is "getting worse" and we have Chicken Littles running all over the place. We used to have hour-long news reports. Now, with commercials, it's 20 minutes, tops. 20 minutes to cram all the day's politics, weather, personalities, sports, tragedies and ephemera. But since most people get their news from Facebook, well, you know how in-depth FB posts are.
I suppose it depends on what the person who is answering the question considers to be “crime”. If you go into a city and there are lots of homeless people you might perceive that the area is more dangerous and that there is more “crime” there.
My own perception is that crime is up in my area. This is because the local news has been reporting a lot of catalytic converter thefts along with an app on my phone “Nextdoor” that has lots of local people reporting various crimes in the neighborhood, mostly auto type thefts and burglary.
As many have commented, I don't think it's mainly a Fox News problem. Crime has been a hardy perennial news story for as long as there have been news stories.
Some years ago, I lived for a while in Edmond, Oklahoma, which is a mostly-rich, mostly-white, mostly-God-fearing suburb just north of Oklahoma City (despite my being a rather poor fit to that demographic). Someone once told me that they knew of a family that forbade their teenage daughters from venturing south of 33rd St after dark, since they would be getting uncomfortably close to the danger posed by Oklahoma City. (33rd St is the southernmost east-west section-line road in Edmond; most of Oklahoma is laid out with major roads on an approximately 1-mile grid.) I took minor offense at this, seeing how I lived south of 33rd St.
Speaking of LA in the middle of the day: https://ktla.com/news/local-news/2-sought-following-armed-robbery-of-customers-sitting-outside-fairfax-district-cafe/
And while it is a TV station reporting it (among others), it was accessed via the Internet, the great democratizer of information access... or so it is purported to be.
I'm not going to defend Fox News, but the difference between local/national crime perceptions seems pretty consistent before and after Fox.