Most people think the U.S. crime rate is rising. They're wrong.
1ft.io
Almost 80 percent of Americans, and 92 percent of Republicans, think crime has gone up. It actually fell in 2023. An expert blames a familiar culprit for the mistaken impression.

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If people aren’t panicked, they wouldn’t elect panic-pandering politicians, so there must always be a panic — crime, drugs, commies, libruls, etc.

  • Sarmyth@lemmy.worldEnglish
    103·
    9 months ago

    In my city, it can be hours to get police to come take a report if it’s a petty crime like theft or vandalism, and that’s if they show at all. That could skew things if it’s happening elsewhere as well. If you d9nt get to report the crime, it’s like it never happened, but your perception of crime will be higher.

    • CoggyMcFee@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      9 months ago

      If reported theft and vandalism declined, but actual theft and vandalism increased, then that would mean that the reporting of theft and vandalism would have had to have decreased significantly during the past few years. I can think of any reason why that would be the case.

      • Jtotheb@lemmy.worldEnglish
        51·
        9 months ago

        Sorry, to be clear, you are responding to someone positing a reason why that would be the case, so you could at least acknowledge what they said in your reply…

        The Council on Criminal Justice wrote a piece recently that mentions that there was a significant decrease in violent crimes reported to police in 2022, which is more or less what they said. As for other possible reasons, The Marshall Project says that the FBI just changed the way they collect their data and “missed nearly 40% of police agencies” in 2021, and then just tried to model what the crime rate would have actually been for the 40% of their respondents that were missing. So there are real and tangible issues with recent data. And all data, but especially recent data

        • ZzyzxRoad@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          2·
          9 months ago

          Last year, the FBI reversed the change and revived the previously-retired data collection system. They also gave agencies that didn’t submit data for 2021 a chance to submit their data retrospectively. Nearly 2,500 agencies took the FBI’s offer and submitted crime data through the old system for 2022, but it’s unclear how many did for 2021.

          I don’t know that this is as monumental as you or the article is making it sound. It’s not like they’re the first ones to ever use a regression model ffs. Nor is it the first time they’ve conducted the NCVS, which always records unreported crimes. The long term trends are what’s most indicative of, well, long term crime rates, which have continued to decrease. Even the article states that the year over year data is just being used by politicians to push whichever narrative about crime they want. Even if there were some issue with one year of data, their point is that the pandemic created irregular results anyway. Individual agencies have also never been forced to submit their data. Iirc they get some kind of block grant or something in return for giving their crime data to the federal government. Which means that there are likely agencies missing from any given year.

          Or you could also just go to the Bureau of Crime Statistics and use the data explorer instead of trusting an article from a nonprofit justice initiative.