Just Because Certain Crimes Are Going Viral Doesn’t Mean Crime Rates Are Increasing

from the what-you-see-isn't-always-what-you-get dept

Perception matters more than reality, especially when your budget is on the line.

Law enforcement agencies like to portray criminal activity as constantly rising, especially now that they’re facing additional scrutiny and the occasional so-called “defunding” effort. It’s a weird way to handle (government) business. On one hand, the cops claim rising crime necessitates more funding. On the other hand, an endlessly escalating crime rate tends to demonstrate cops aren’t an effective solution to the problem.

Portraying America as crime-ridden has worked out well for most law enforcement agencies. The tough questions are almost never asked by local legislators who tend to give cops whatever they want, rather than risk being perceived as “soft” on crime.

These efforts are assisted by the media, both social and otherwise. Viral footage of smash-and-grab robberies have flooded the internet, leading to calls for more cops. Lackluster vehicle security has lent itself to spikes in very specific auto thefts, now that joyriders and professionals alike have discovered manufacturers like Kia have sold millions of compromised vehicles to unsuspecting customers.

On top of all of this is the “Thin Blue Line” lie. Cops claim they’re the only thing standing between us and utter criminal chaos. But they tend to drive this point home by pointing to all the crime they’ve failed to prevent (or solve), evidently confident most of the general public will misconstrue the data in law enforcement’s favor. This is also why they continue to agitate for special rights and less oversight. The job is dangerous, they say, while conveniently ignoring years of subpar policing has made things the way they are, rather than some increase in criminal-mindedness in the policed — people who are generally unable to directly benefit from increased crime.

The FBI continues to gather crime stats from local law enforcement agencies. It’s an imperfect system — one that has been recently complicated by additional demands for more granular detail. The data being handed to the FBI tends to be incomplete or inaccurate. The data handed to local oversight is even more so.

The FBI, however, must work with what it gets. And years of “uniform” crime reporting at least provides baselines for comparison, even if the data is often flawed. A bad data baseline sets the standard for future reporting. Even if it’s impossible to tell how accurate this data is, it can be compared to past, similarly-flawed, reports to draw inferences about crime rates.

Guess what? Crime is down yet again — something difficult to infer from social media activity and nightly news reports that portray criminal activity anomalies as day-to-day criminal business.

This examination of the FBI’s latest crime data by David Lautner of the Los Angeles Times perforates the perception: crime is not on the rise in the United States, no matter how much anecdotal evidence is dumped into citizens’ brains via careless reporting or even more careless amplification of a handful of viral clips.

Homicides in the U.S. dropped significantly in 2022 and have plummeted even faster this year, putting the country on track for one of the biggest declines in killing ever recorded, crime statistics show.

That’s great news. Fewer people than ever are being killed by other people in the United States. Of course, that significant decline has been ignored because other criminal activity is making more headlines: i.e., pockets of property crime driven by isolated instances that are portrayed as a nationwide epidemic in theft.

The homicide drop reported by the FBI is probably only half the actual drop in homicides. The data presented by the FBI isn’t real-time. Instead, it presents a picture of a reality that’s at least a year old by the time it’s reported. And the data isn’t updated on the fly as more local law enforcement reporting arrives at the FBI offices. Consequently, the 6% drop in homicides is likely double that, which would make this one of the most precipitous drops in year-to-year homicide rates ever observed in this country.

The FBI data, which the bureau compiled from reports filed by 18,888 local police departments, lags nearly a year behind reality. [Crime data analyst Jeff] Asher, who puts together data from departments that cover a large majority of the nation’s population, says that so far this year, homicides nationwide have declined 11% to 12%.

But asking Americans if crime is down never results in a “yes.” What they see splashed across their many screens is what they assume is the reality, even though it’s just an amplification of noise that easily drowns out the signal. Violent crime may be up slightly year-to-year, but Americans tend to assume the murder rate has never not increased every year.

The public perception is very different. Gallup, for example, has surveyed Americans every fall for years about crime. Last year’s survey found that by 56%-28%, Americans said crime had increased in their area.

Violent crime, especially homicides, have declined almost every year for most of the past three decades. Crime rates hit their high in 1991. Since then, steady declines have led to something most Americans have been unable to enjoy due to media sensationalism: historically low crime rates that make this nation one of the safest on earth.

That’s why people (and legislators) still insist on “tough on crime” policies despite criminal activity being at an all-time low. What they see is what they think, but they’re being fed a steady diet of “the world is ending” content by social media and local news stations.

The power of anecdote explains much of it: In a country of nearly 340 million people, some crime takes place every hour, every day. Those incidents stick in people’s minds, especially when the details are grisly. Vivid stories have far more power than dry numbers to shape how people view their world. And in the social media era, crimes anywhere can be just a click away.

“Every time there’s a smash-and-grab, it just amplifies in people’s minds that crime’s out of control,” said pollster David Paleologos, director of the Suffolk University polling center, which has surveyed residents of many of the country’s major cities.

It’s not that criminal acts don’t happen. It’s that many people treat subjective reporting as objective reality. What’s being amplified isn’t the reality of a situation. And it never will be. What makes headlines and gets millions of re-posts isn’t a slice of life that distills the overall reality into one eye-grabbing recording. Those are things on the edges of everyday life — things that happen but do not depict what people can expect the moment they leave the relative safety of their homes.

Somehow, this all works out for the government. The tacit admission it can’t control crime should see people demanding more accountability from these agencies and more hesitancy to let legislatures issue blank checks for cop stuff. Instead, the opposite happens: people demand harsher criminal penalties, increased funding for law enforcement agencies, and greater hysteria from everyone in their social circle.

If there’s any good news, it is this: people are less likely to believe all the stuff that didn’t work in the high-crime 1990s is likely to be any better now, even if they believe (despite plenty of evidence to the contrary) crime is on the rise. Cops can’t just brutalize their way through this, something some candidates have discovered while trying to reclaim the spirit of the 90s more than 30 years later.

After the killing of George Floyd in 2020, when some Democrats on the left embraced calls to “defund the police,” Republicans stepped up efforts to tag Democrats as soft on crime. Despite widespread worry among Democratic elected officials, however, that effort fell far short of its goal in both 2020 and 2022, including in the Los Angeles mayoral election, in which Rick Caruso leaned heavily on concerns about crime and homelessness in his unsuccessful campaign.

Even the people who vote the most — predominantly white people over the age of 55 — aren’t willing to embrace everything that didn’t work in the 1990s, even if they believe crime rates are actually worse than they were 30 years ago. Fifty years of drug war losses will do that even to the most conservative or jaded voter. Locking people up on the regular didn’t make cities safer then and it won’t do it now. There are underlying concerns that need to be addressed — something that can’t be handled by facists-come-latelys who think the only way to combat a nonexistent crime problem is converting their bailiwicks to police states.

Filed Under: crime, fear, moral panic, police