The New York Times reported yesterday on fear of crime:
Debra Kowalski, a 49-year-old nurse in Bucks County, Pa., has been pleading with her elderly parents to move out of Philadelphia, especially after a delivery driver was shot and killed last month a few blocks from their home.
....Though polls show that voters’ biggest concerns are about the economy and inflation, many Americans — especially more conservative voters like these, but also moderates and liberals — say they are gripped by worries over crime and disorder. Even though national crime trends are mixed, these voters have seen reports of homicide spikes in places like Memphis, Milwaukee, Albuquerque and Jacksonville, Fla., and have heard from friends and neighbors who have been victims of car thefts or muggings.
In many cases, their anxieties stem not from experiencing serious crime, but from seeing homeless encampments, or finding a syringe or human waste on the sidewalk, or reading accounts in their neighborhood social networks of vandalism on a local bike path.
As the article goes on to say, national statistics are hopeless and wouldn't be available yet for 2022 even under the best circumstances. But we do have some local stats, especially from big cities that use CompStat or some other crime software that they make available to the public.
I don't feel like doing this for every city that comes up in the news, but here's the latest from the crime infested city of Philadelphia:
Violent crime is up 4.18% this year. What's more, that's driven entirely by robberies. Murder is down, rape is down, and serious assault is down. Only robberies are up.
And one other thing: outside of the top five biggest cities, I'm not sure people realize how small the violent crime numbers are. For example, the robbery numbers in Philadelphia really are up a ton, but even at that it's an increase of 1,100 incidents in a city of 1.6 million. Your odds of being robbed in 2022 increased by considerably less than one in a thousand. Without underplaying the seriousness of any increase in crime, especially one like robbery, this is just not a crime wave, no matter how many times Fox News says it is.
An increase of violent crime of over four percent is slight? How high does it have to be to be not slight?
How low does it have to be for you to not think it’s too high? It’d be nice if the people worried about crime told us how much is too much, so we could determine whether their preferences for crime are realistic and achievable. I have a feeling for many people any number above zero for most newsworthy crimes is “too much,” yet no society on earth achieves zero.
Per Kevin’s favored lead-crime hypothesis we’ve had crime rates “grow” negatively. Certainly crime will never go to zero, but it does not seem unreasonable to expect it not to grow over time.
As for my definition of “slight” I would say two percent or lower.
How low does "discrimination" have to be for you not to think it's too high? It’d be nice if the people worried about discrimination told us how much is too much, so we could determine whether their preferences for discrimination are realistic and achievable.
See, two can play that game...
I clicked on the link. It looks like there was an enormous jump in homicides between 2019 and 2020 and then a leveling off in 2021 and 2022. When people talk about the increase in crime, it is (1) the reversal of the decreasing trend that stretched from the early 90s into the mid 2020s, (2) the big COVID-year increase, and (3) the sustained levels over the past two years that they talking about. Of course, amplification by Republicans and the media is another factor in what people perceive.
Somehow though the guy actually in charge in 2020 managed to avoid all blame for letting crime get out of control. Similar to how Bush II “kept us safe,” except of course for that day in September 2001 when he was in office and he didn’t.
So you WANT more federal control over crime, rather than local control?
If not, then don't bring up irrelevancies like the President (or Congress/Senate).
Fox News recognizes that ostensible insecurity about crime is a surrogate for insecurity about losing special status vice 'those people.' So they play up criminal incidents no matter how statistically meaningless.
Citation required.
Crime is like velocity, folks. People don't notice when it's constant. They notice when it changes. So if the first derivative of the crime rate is positive, people will be more pissed than they are when it's negative even if the absolute rate is higher.
Sophisticated political people know this but pretend to be stupid and use charts to make people feel stupid and tell them their feelings are invalid.
Having said that a lot of feelings about "crime," in Southern California at least, seem to correlate more strongly with homelessness than with any one crime state.
>> People don't notice when it's constant. They notice when it changes.<<
I don’t think that true. When the crime rate was going way down when I asked people if they thought the crime rate was going up or down they always said “up” and most of the time thought I was lying when I told them otherwise.
They don't notice when the number of crimes change; they notice when the number of crime reports on local & cable news increase.
So, during election years.
Bingo! Folks are easily manipulated alas. It's pretty clear that's the case on the NextDoor app where I got banned for a week for pointing out that Tucker Carlson is a white supremacist.
if crime literally ceased to exist, it would still be a problem in the minds of many
This is probably the closest to reality. They learned this as children and will carry it to their graves. After they've taught their spawn.
Gun crimes are up and you constantly hear about it--even if the reports are from across the country, they feel like their almost next door.
Not to mention more people have apps that report issues in their area, doorbell cameras, etc. If you have notifications turned on, it's a nightmare. All these things were going on before--but now you know....
Also, “true crime” is apparently all the rage with lots of podcasts and YouTube channels dedicated to it. It creates a state of fear. Some of the “cases” are years old, but discussed in minute detail.
Yeah…. But some rapper got whacked in Houston the other day.
Eight people got killed and burned in Oklahoma too.
Four more were pulled from an Oklahoma river… in pieces.
That kid in St. Louis killed two at a school.
And that’s just a few worth mentioning. People getting murdered all over. To heck with Philly…. There was a fight in the ladies room at the World Series!
It’s all the fault of democrats. Who else can you blame?
Five dead in a murder suicide in Charles County, MD yesterday ;-(
For example, the robbery numbers in Philadelphia really are up a ton, but even at that it's an increase of 1,100 incidents in a city of 1.6 million.
So, there's been an increase of 3-4 incidents of people and business being held up at knife or gunpoint per day. Again, that's just the increase.
Philadelphia is a large jurisdiction, sure, but these kind of numbers—even if they drive a somewhat irrational fear of being victimized by crime—nonetheless decrease quality of life by making people feel less safe (crimes like that are widely reported, after all).
I'm a firm believer in concentrating mostly on the murder rate; just raising the above point to provide a different perspective.
The real crime is the perpetuation of the idea that Republicans are better on crime and the economy than Democrats.