It’s misleading because headlines like this evoke muggings and breakins more than having your bottle of shampoo disappear from your porch, and because there’s no corresponding rate elsewhere to compare against.
Most of the folks in my very low crime neighborhood have still lost a package once every few years. Are we technically crime victims? Sure. Is our area dangerous? lol, no.
The headline says half of SF residents in survey have been victims of theft.
Which is exactly what the survey results said.
What's the misleading part.
It didn't say muggings or break-ins it said theft.
It also didn't ask if people felt their neighborhood was dangerous. That's a different type of question that also isn't necessarily a crime statistic.
For example, do you think it's dangerous if there's a deranged person outside your home with a knife claiming he's going to knife the next infant he sees? According to crime statistics that's completely irrelevant to the neighborhood's safety.
Different numbers measure different things.
It's just such an odd specific criticism to call a survey copaganda, when it appears to be one of the very very few crime related metrics I have read that is NOT collected and communicated by cops.
Most of the folks in my very low crime neighborhood have still lost a package once every few years. Are we technically crime victims? Sure. Is our area dangerous? lol, no.