I’m taking off blogging for the week (no comments and no unscheduled posts), so to hold everyone over, here is a reposting of another writer’s essay (with a few minor editorial changes). I’m keeping in anonymous because it’s not publicly and freely accessible.
Crime has declined significantly since its peak in the early ’90s.
Yet today, 63% of Americans say crime in the U.S. is ‘extremely’ or ‘very serious,’ a 7-point increase from 1996, when actual crime rates were nearly twice as high.
Violent crime, according to victimization studies has not appreciably changed since about 2005.
People report crime a lot less because reporting minor crimes doesn’t really matter anymore, no one’s going to do anything. This is the first error in “the data”.
The decline since the early-90s is deceptive. We are still well above what we were before society rended itself in the 60s and 70s. So crime is still a lot higher than normal.
Medical technology has reduced murder by about 4/5s. The murder rate would be 5x higher except doctors have gotten better at turning murders into assaults. See this paper.
Imagine this chart, except at the end it’s at 20 (ie, it’s off the graph, twice as high as the graph goes). This is how much murder we have, except now the docs stitch you up better. This is the second error in “the data”.
Third, this is all after normal Americans have completely rearranged their lives to avoid violence and crime.
If every time you take your kid to the park a bully pushes him, so you stop taking them to the park, pushing numbers have gone down, but it hasn’t solved bullying. And this is all of society. Normal Americans have retreated from the city to suburbs, they’ve retreated from an public transit, retreated from public places, retreated to “good schools” and “safe neighbourhoods”, kids don’t play outside or wander, etc., etc.
All this retreating by normal people makes the crime numbers go down, but this doesn’t mean society is safer, it doesn’t mean crime has gone down, it doesn’t mean people feel safer, all it means is violent criminals have won and control vast swathes of formerly public spaces.
This is the third error in “the data”. Your numbers aren’t measuring crime or violence as societal phenomena but are rather empty numbers divorced from their societal context
People are not safer. Crime is not lower
People are hiding from crime and your numbers don’t measure it.
Now maybe crime in the US can still be called serious. There is a case, given America’s vastly higher crime rates than most developed nations.
But the polling certainly points either to a) shifting standards amongst the population or b) perceptions matching poorly to reality.
The problem is not ‘people’s perceptions don’t match reality’, the problem is your data doesn’t match reality. It is not measuring what you purport it measures.
The typical liberal response to this is just to say that everybody is stupid and mistaken, but what this says to me is that we don’t know anything about human psychology. And also that we aren’t really great sociologists, either. How well are we comparing the American experience in the 1990s to that of today. Can we do this in any rigorous way at all?
It’s all just guessing.
Wayne is writing in good faith, so I don’t want to dunk on him to him, but it’s not a matter psychology Society actually is more violent than it was prior to the 70s and still as violent as those peaks, but people have adapted to keep themselves safe.
Homicide is a good proxy for crime over time because it is generally always tracked well. Hard to hide a body.
Homicide spiked under prohibition but after prohibition ended, crime it dropped significantly.
It in late-60s and 70s it exploded again and remained elevated since.
And I keep saying this.
There is “less crime” and “crime is declining” is one of those societal myths that people take for granted.
You notice the drop in the 90s, but it is not real.
The data masks a decrease in homicides caused by better medicine. The people are still being stabbed or shot, but modern medicine makes those assaults instead of murder.
Without modern medicine, murder ates would be 5x higher than they are. If you altered the graph with the 5x figure, it would be almost exponential. We are living in an insanely crime-ridden society, it’s just covered up by bad statistics and modern medicine.
All the “crime’s not real” people are either uninformed or just lying to you. It is high, it has been high since the 70s, and it has only gotten worse. They just don’t record crime and doctors are much better at turning murders into assaults.
And remember, this explosion in crime is including the effects of actions people take to reduce crime. This is after everybody moved to the suburbs, locked their doors, bought home security systems, barred their windows, and defined their lives in defence-in-depth against crime.
Not to mention the high incarceration rates and prison-industrial complex. Crime exploded and massive amounts of resources went into preventing, mitigating, and punishing crime and crime is still far beyond anything your grandfather would have lived with.