1. Crime pays less than it used to. Back in the good old days, people carried more cash on them. Pickpocketing and mugging was reasonably profitable when everyone had money. These days, everyone has credit cards. I frequently carry less than forty dollars; I've gone weeks where I have zero cash in my wallet.
2. It's harder to avoid the fuzz. Police techniques have gotten dramatically better. Everything from witness protection programs (Now you can testify against the mob boss without worrying about feeding the fish) to analysis of crime patterns means that police are collecting more evidence than ever before.
3. Entire avenues of crime have disappeared due to 1 and 2. For example, auto theft has declined dramatically due to the institution of chipped keys, GPS tracking, and the easy apprehension of chop shops.
4. While violent crime has declined in profitability, white-collar crime has become much more lucrative. There's big money in identity theft, for example. This means that the ambitious criminals who would have previously been robbing banks and mugging people are now doing their crime online and over the phone.
I don't think that these things are exclusively responsible; I'd just like to add them to the nice list that you have going.
> 4. While violent crime has declined in profitability, white-collar crime has become much more lucrative. There's big money in identity theft, for example. This means that the ambitious criminals who would have previously been robbing banks and mugging people are now doing their crime online and over the phone.
Just want to add to this credit card theft (i.e. Target and Home Depot). The rewards are so much higher, and you never have to face someone in person to steal from them.
This is the sort of casual prejudice about eastern europe that I despise. Sure you can probably say something like "well I just picked Eastern Europe at random" but I think we all know that's not the case, and that's a little sad.
"Phishing and related cybercrime is responsible for billions of dollars in losses annually. Gartner reported more than 5
million U.S. consumers lost money to phishing attacks in the 12 months ending in September 2008 (Gartner 2009). This
paper asks whether the majority of organised phishing and related cybercrime originates in Eastern Europe rather than
elsewhere such as China or the USA. The Russian “Mafiya” in particular has been popularised by the media and
entertainment industries to the point where it can be hard to separate fact from fiction but we have endeavoured to look
critically at the information available on this area to produce a survey. We take a particular focus on cybercrime from
an Australian perspective, as Australia was one of the first places where Phishing attacks against Internet banks were
seen. It is suspected these attacks came from Ukrainian spammers. The survey is built from case studies both where
individuals from Eastern Europe have been charged with related crimes or unsolved cases where there is some nexus to
Eastern Europe. It also uses some earlier work done looking at those early Phishing attacks, archival analysis of
Phishing attacks in July 2006 and new work looking at correlation between the Corruption Perception Index, Internet
penetration and tertiary education in Russia and the Ukraine. The value of this work is to inform and educate those
charged with responding to cybercrime where a large part of the problem originates and try to understand why. "
I'm only one data point, but I've had three credit cards used maliciously. Each pre-auth for 1 dollar came from a company somewhere in Europe. After my card had been shut off, I would get a call asking about transactions, and they would all start off with that similar transaction.
Perhaps the person stealing the information is based anywhere, but the company commonly issuing the pre-auths is in Europe?
> Police techniques have gotten dramatically better. Everything from witness protection programs
In what ways have witness protection programs improved? More money? I can't think of any technological changes that help here and although I have no knowledge of such a think I think social networking would make Witness Protection a lot harder(not just using your old name/putting up pictures/auto face tagging but possibly something invloving your social graph)
Witness protection programs appeared not that long ago, between thirty and forty years ago. I don't think that they are relevant for most street crime, but rather for investigations of organized crime.
> 1. Crime pays less than it used to. Back in the good old days, people carried more cash on them. Pickpocketing and mugging was reasonably profitable when everyone had money. These days, everyone has credit cards. I frequently carry less than forty dollars; I've gone weeks where I have zero cash in my wallet.
On the other hand, now everyone has a smartphone in their pocket. My friends and I entered Southeast Asia with four phones and left with one. None of our wallets were pickpocketed, but that may just be chance.
iOS 7 devices are bricks when stolen if Find My iPhone is enabled. Android could get there eventually. That might well be a technological problem with a technological solution.
- It's harder to avoid being caught now. Could a 70's style Mafia survive today? I doubt it. I think we can give some credit to better police techniques. Before DNA testing it was probably way easier to get away with murder (literally).
- Absolute wealth has risen (although inequality has risen as well). The magnitude of crime you need to commit to survive without "real" income is lower than it used to be.
- Probably something to do with wealthier people migrating towards cities again. Although that could be the effect of lower crime and not the cause.
- Some crime has moved online, which can't be violent.
> Could a 70's style Mafia survive today? I doubt it.
RICO deserves a lot of the credit. Capone was booked on tax evasion instead of, say, all the murders. It took almost 40 years for an effective federal racketeering statute to be passed, and longer still for police and prosecutors to learn how to use it.
RICO has its downsides, has been criticized for providing too much power to law enforcement. It's a pretty solid mob busting tool though.
That said, two caveats. First, I'm not sure how much of crime is due to organized crime. I'm not sure that affects your bigger point though, that police techniques (as well as maybe legal tools) have improved.
Secondly, note that organized crime does exist today. La Cosa Nostra is still around, as are various eastern European and Asian groups. Albanian groups are apparently one of the most formidable rising threats. Organized crime is probably harder, but it's also probably adapted to find ways to not get caught.
My favorite theory: Cellphones. Now black markets do not require real estate, which means no bloodbaths for prime territory. Cellphones turned the black market into a ubiquitous thing that's all about lead gen!
(Though I guess that article still has some threats as spillover, threats on the internet are pretty common, so maybe they're acted out less frequently?)
Rise of more sophisticated, engaging and cheap entertainment - especially movies, video games, and the internet.
Can't believe no one mentioned this - and on a tech site no less. Why commit a murder and go to jail when you can get just as much sadistic pleasure with none of the consequences by doing it in a video game or vicariously through a movie character?
I've thought about this vector as well, and it's not just about sating bloodlust - a lot of crime happens when people get bored. A greater variety of entertainment that is much easier to access keeps the boredom at bay. It's the 'circuses' part of 'bread and circuses'.
The abortion explanation has been repeated so frequently that many people have accepted this explanation without digging further into the details. This is one of many explanations that Steven Pinker discusses in his book "Better Angels of our Nature." I am not sure it is as clear cut as you imagine: (I apologize for the lengthy excerpt)
When I told people I was writing a book on the historical decline of
violence, I was repeatedly informed that the phenomenon had already been
solved. Rates of violence have come down, they explained to me, because
after abortion was legalized by the 1973 Roe v. Wade U.S. Supreme Court
decision, the unwanted children who would ordinarily have grown up to be
criminals were not born in the first place, because their begrudging or
unfit mothers had had abortions instead. I first heard of this theory in
2001 when it was proposed by the economists John Donohue and Steven
Levitt, but it seemed too cute to be true.147 Any hypothesis that comes
out of left field to explain a massive social trend with a single
overlooked event will almost certainly turn out to be wrong, even if it
has some data supporting it at the time. But Levitt, together with the
journalist Stephen Dubner, popularized the theory in their bestseller
Freakonomics , and now a large proportion of the public believes that
crime went down in the 1990s because women aborted their crime-fated
fetuses in the 1970s.
To be fair, Levitt went on to argue that Roe v. Wade was just one of
four causes of the crime decline, and he has presented sophisticated
correlational statistics in support of the connection. For example, he
showed that the handful of states that legalized abortion before 1973
were the first to see their crime rates go down.148 But these statistics
compare the two ends of a long, hypothetical, and tenuous causal
chain—the availability of legal abortion as the first link and the
decline in crime two decades later as the last—and ignore all the links
in between. The links include the assumptions that legal abortion causes
fewer unwanted children, that unwanted children are more likely to become
criminals, and that the first abortion-culled generation was the one
spearheading the 1990s crime decline. But there are other explanations
for the overall correlation (for example, that the large liberal states
that first legalized abortion were also the first states to see the rise
and fall of the crack epidemic), and the intermediate links have turned
out to be fragile or nonexistent.149
To begin with, the freakonomics theory assumes that women were just as
likely to have conceived unwanted children before and after 1973, and
that the only difference was whether the children were born. But once
abortion was legalized, couples may have treated it as a backup method of
birth control and may have engaged in more unprotected sex. If the women
conceived more unwanted children in the first place, the option of
aborting more of them could leave the proportion of unwanted children the
same. In fact, the proportion of unwanted children could even have
increased if women were emboldened by the abortion option to have more
unprotected sex in the heat of the moment, but then procrastinated or had
second thoughts once they were pregnant. That may help explain why in the
years since 1973 the proportion of children born to women in the most
vulnerable categories—poor, single, teenage, and African American—did not
decrease, as the freakonomics theory would predict. It increased, and by
a lot.150
What about differences among individual women within a crime-prone
population? Here the freakonomics theory would seem to get things
backwards. Among women who are accidentally pregnant and unprepared to
raise a child, the ones who terminate their pregnancies are likely to be
forward-thinking, realistic, and disciplined, whereas the ones who carry
the child to term are more likely to be fatalistic, disorganized, or
immaturely focused on the thought of a cute baby rather than an unruly
adolescent. Several studies have borne this out.151 Young pregnant women
who opt for abortions get better grades, are less likely to be on
welfare, and are more likely to finish school than their counterparts who
have miscarriages or carry their pregnancies to term. The availability of
abortion thus may have led to a generation that is more prone to crime
because it weeded out just the children who, whether through genes or
environment, were most likely to exercise maturity and self-control.
Also, the freakonomists’ theory about the psychological causes of crime
comes right out of “Gee, Officer Krupke,” when a gang member says of his
parents, “They didn’t wanna have me, but somehow I was had. Leapin’
lizards! That’s why I’m so bad!” And it is about as plausible. Though
unwanted children may grow up to commit more crimes, it is more likely
that women in crime-prone environments have more unwanted children than
that unwantedness causes criminal behavior directly. In studies that pit
the effects of parenting against the effects of the children’s peer
environment, holding genes constant, the peer environment almost always
wins.152
Finally, if easy abortion after 1973 sculpted a more crime-averse
generation, the crime decline should have begun with the youngest
group and then crept up the age brackets as they got older. The
sixteen-year-olds of 1993, for example (who were born in 1977, when
abortions were in full swing), should have committed fewer crimes than
the sixteen-year-olds of 1983 (who were born in 1967, when abortion was
illegal). By similar logic, the twenty-two-year-olds of 1993 should have
remained violent, because they were born in pre-Roe 1971. Only in the
late 1990s, when the first post-Roe generation reached their twenties,
should the twenty-something age bracket have become less violent. In
fact, the opposite happened. When the first post-Roe generation came
of age in the late 1980s and early 1990s, they did not tug the
homicide statistics downward; they indulged in an unprecedented spree of
mayhem. The crime decline began when the older cohorts, born well before
Roe, laid down their guns and knives, and from them the lower homicide
rates trickled down the age scale.153
The typesetting/justification of your text looks beautiful. I know it's been a solved problem for fixed-width fonts for roughly forty years, but what tool did you use to lay out the text like that? Some emacs magic or vim plugin? (I wish HN had a private messaging system for offtopic but harmless questions like this.)
No need to apologize, a private message would mean that others do not get to benefit from you asking a question;)
I used `par` to typeset the text. It has not been updated in over a decade but I have never found a better tool for this. The documentation leaves a little to be desired but I think a lot of that is due to the flexibility of the program. For that specific quote I used `cat text | par 75j` with the man page recommended value in $PARINIT.
1. Going to the end of a line and pressing “Ctrl-x f” to run the set-fill-column command, to set the desired line width. (The default value is 70 characters.)
2. On each of the paragraphs, pressing “Ctrl-u Meta-q” to run the fill-paragraph command (with an argument to modify it to do justification as well as word wrapping).
You make great points with the increase in births and demonstrated forward-thinking population information.
I do find these surprising as it's important to note that, while Abortion was illegal prior to Roe vs. Wade, there were certainly many performed. The legalization mostly made abortions available in a safer and more accessible manner, particularly to the poor or less forward-thinking.
Several people have mentioned gaming, but it's more than just an outlet.
People spend a lot more time indoors due to video games and the internet. Fewer interactions mean less random third party crime. Also, credit cards credit / debit cards reduced the amount of cash people walk around with at the same time stuff became less valuable. So there is just less money to be made robbing people / houses.
Looking forward to adding the end of drug prohibition / war on drugs, to this list in the coming decade. In theory there should be another significant drop in crime, from the reduction in direct and indirect drug crime.
In fact, I'd argue there are only two concentrated causes of crime left in America: prohibition, and black + immigrant poverty (with the war on drugs and the prison machine having a significant role to play in black poverty).
Crudely put, the idea is that lead in gasoline meant lead in auto fumes, which mean lead in the air. Lead in the air meant lead entering the body through the lungs, which meant mass low-grade lead poisoning / developmental problems.
The above links to Mother Jones do a pretty good job. To make a long story short, the lead in the fuel came down to earth in solid particulate form, and formed fairly high concentrations in the soil, where it was ingested by kids.
Noting Crito's comment, I don't know if inhalation or ingestion was the primary vector.
I was under the impression that inhalation played a large role; suggested by elevated crime rates in urban areas where there was an abundance of car fumes but next to zero farming.
I may be wrong about that; I'll have to read more about this topic.
What I remember reading is that kids ingest a finite amount of soil in the course of simply being outdoors. In fact lead forms some compounds that are actually tasty, and I think it was in the time of the ancient Romans that they boiled wine in lead pots to produce lead acetate, an artificial sweetener.
Hell I remember reading an interesting study posted on here correlating leaded gas to crime rates. According to the study elevated ambient lead levels correlated with higher crime rates. Though in all likelihood there's probably a multitude of reasons.
Violent crime is decreasing across the western world which suggests that factors that are only relevant to one country/culture are unlikely to be the main driving force of this phenomenon.
While the proportion of people in poverty has fallen significantly over the last 20 years or so, the absolute number of people in poverty is still quite high because the bulk of population growth is in very poor areas.
The first graph from those questions is weird. It seems to stop in the mid 2000s... in 2004, at least 280,000 people died in the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami. That would make the graph sharply rise again, yet it isn't on there. Does the graph stop at 2003 on purpose, is it not listed, or something else?
That's what happens when people keep talking about "growing inequalities" instead of focusing on the fact that everyone is actually getting richer with time (and obviously people who already have a lot of capital grow richer faster). There's no zero-sum game at work.
Well if you have 1 million dollar and you don't grow your capital faster than someone who has 100 dollars in the bank, you are doing something deeply wrong with your investments.
When you have lots of capital you have access to investment opportunities which simply do not exist below a certain level, too. So I'm not sure where the "not trivially true" is coming from.
First, we have to decide whether we are going to measure absolute differences or proportions.
If we go for proportions, which makes sense since utility of money is roughly logarithmic, it is not at all clear that you can grow 1 million dollar faster than 100 dollar.
If we go for absolute differences, than most of the time the millionair will be ahead. But in the recent financial crisis lots of rich people lost lots of wealth (at least on paper), while poor people can only lose so much in an absolute sense.
Agree if we talk on proportions - while, as I mentioned, the millionaire has access to investment options unavailable to "normal" people and therefore should still be able to grow faster even in proportion.
But most of the time when the media talk about inequalities, they talk about them in absolute values.
> the millionaire has access to investment options unavailable to "normal" people and therefore should still be able to grow faster even in proportion.
But the millionaire also needs bigger opportunities. It's much harder for Warren Buffett to find billion dollar opportunities now, than it used to be for him to find million dollar opportunities.
> It’s an unfortunate fact that media reporting on individual crimes yields a relentlessly dismal drumbeat of downbeat news. But even as each reported crime yields a story that is terrifying enough to shape our perceptions, the truth is that none of them tells us much about the broader trends. Far better to ignore the anecdotes and focus instead on the big picture, and the hard data tells us: There’s been a remarkable decline in crime.
But then the media isn't really about giving us perspective, is it?
No, it really isn't. It's about getting viewers, selling newspapers, and getting clicks. And the best way to achieve that is by using strong emotion, usually negative. Fear, hatred, disgust, anger.
I'm not sure how a democracy is supposed to work, when the people voting are being given bad information on such a massive scale.
There are so many important areas when what people believe and what is true are miles apart.
Not only haven't they "caught up" but the 24-hour news cycle seems to have made many people (perhaps most people) in the US believe that the crime rates have gone up significantly.
I've quit trying to correct people about this (because it is apparently fruitless) on places like Facebook where friends and family will make off-handed claims about how bad the crime is these days compared to "the good old days" (where the "good old days" is circa the late 70s to the early 90s relative to these people's ages).
All of your fancy data is no match for people's emotional response perceptions.
I'd like to see it compared with news viewership/readership from various sources. Do people who watch TV news overestimate crime more than those who read news online? How does education about current events affect the estimates?
Though I have no data, I'm skeptical that the 24-hour news cycle is the primary factor. I would guess that people always tend to overestimate the crime rate, as a far fundamental bias, similar to how then-modern technology is always ruining society [0], or "kids these days" are always the worst generation ever to grace the planet. The article doesn't say whether people have gotten less accurate over time with their crime rate estimates.
An observation hardly unique to crime stats. The 24 hour internet is happy to convince you that the police have never been more brutal, your food has never been more poisoned, etc.
> Not only haven't they "caught up" but the 24-hour news cycle seems to have made many people (perhaps most people) in the US believe that the crime rates have gone up significantly.
There's far too much money to be made and too much gain for some political parties to do anything other than pretend it's the end days of the crimpocalypse.
The victims Violent Crime may have decreased but the victims of non-violent (white-collar) crimes may have actually increased.
How many people were "victimized" in the recent Financial crisis? How about the spate of people in asset forfeiture by the police just for being in the wrong place? How many victims of recent Credit card breaches?
These stats might accurately reflect that the US is moving from an industrial to a post-industrial information & services economy - the criminals are correspondingly adapting to where the real money is.
> The victims Violent Crime may have decreased but the victims of non-violent (white-collar) crimes may have actually increased.
This is an extremely important point. The way you fight white collar crime is comprehensively different than the way you fight violent crime. BearCats and SWAT teams are utterly useless.
Traditional law enforcement in general just doesn't work. You can't deter systemic risk with post facto sentencing. If the criminals live in a non-extradition country then obtaining evidence against them is pointless.
What is necessary is to help victims to not be victims rather than trying to apprehend the perpetrators after the fact. The problem is we put the FBI and DoJ in charge of it rather than the National Science Foundation.
We would do well to take half the DoJ's budget and put it into grants for computer security research, free security audits for popular software and libraries and UX improvements for the likes of PGP.
The rise of video games. More teenagers are playing video games and venting out their anger in the games or online instead of hanging out in the streets shooting each other.
I wonder if the people who send offensive messages to others in online games are the same who would in previous generations would have sprayed offensive graffiti on walls?
It may not be the main reason (which is believe is the tetraethyl lead mentioned in other posts), the effect videogames has had on violence is not trivial. Probably not for "outlet for rage" reasons, but simply because they are a powerful draw on someone's time. Spending time playing video games is less time left for loitering and petty crime.
I submit as "evidence" a bit of anecdata I like to call the "doom curve":
I believe there is a similar thing happening with people's beliefs about aviation safety. I think people understand it's generally safe, but I don't think most people realize how incredibly safe major US airlines are. The media plays a similar role there too, the difference being that some years there aren't even any crashes to report on, so they report when something goes wrong but everyone comes out safely anyway as if that's something to be scared of when really that highlights how good emergency procedures are.
OK, this probably doesn't apply to violent crime, but petty crime like pickpocketing, etc. There is basically no point in reporting it. The police will do nothing. I live in Barcelona, and there is a lot of this stuff goes on (I had my wallet stolen once, lots of tourists get robbed). I went to the police when my friends camera was stolen. Did anything happen after? No. Yet I have been stopped 5 times for my cycling behavior (going through red lights on a quite road usually).
Neither. I think the general perception (certainly amongst the younger people) is that the police are a corrupt waste of time. They are very enthusiastic with protestors in a violent way, but do nothing about things getting stolen.
The people that make money from the law enforcement and private prison industries don't want people to be aware of these numbers. It makes it too difficult to sell new LEO toys and prison beds.
Legalizing mj nationwide will probably help the numbers go even lower. LEOs should be focusing more on the nastier drugs like meth, gangs and white collar crime against the elderly and others that are vulnerable.
How much is due to changes in or the unreliability of the statistics? The article (and many others) say perceptions haven't caught up with reality, but really they mean that perception hasn't caught up with statistics -- perhaps the statistics don't reflect reality. I don't know one way or the other, but I haven't seen these questions addressed:
1) I don't know much about how the data is produced, but certainly if law enforcement practitioners, down to the sergeants, are under pressure to produce better and better statistics (which many reports say is true), they are incentivized to reduce those stats and not crime.
I've read news stories of police not reporting or fudging crime stats (e.g., reporting a serious crime as a moderate one, not reporting lower-level crimes, etc.). And under that pressure, they may use strategies that produce more numerical improvement than public safety.
2) How could the FBI accurately measure nation-wide crime, every mugging in every small town? Do others measure it?
3) Some of the numbers are extraordinary; doesn't that raise red flags for you?: (both quotes are from the article)
* "the F.B.I.'s count of violent crimes reported to law enforcement has declined from a rate of 747 violent incidents per 100,000 people in 1993 to 387 ... over this period, the homicide rate has fallen by 51 percent; forcible rapes have declined by 35 percent; robberies have decreased by 56 percent; and the rate of aggravated assault has been cut by 45 percent. Property crime rates are also sharply down."
* "The National Crime Victimization Survey reports that the rate of violent victimizations has declined by 67 percent since 1993. This reflects a 70 percent decline in rape and sexual assault; a 66 percent decline in robbery; a 77 percent decline in aggravated assault; and a 64 percent decline in simple assault."
This is a very reasonable question. One way to get at the question of whether the reduction is real is to look at crimes where it's hard to game the statistics and see if they follow the same trends as other crimes.
One of the best crimes to look at is murder, since it's much harder to reclassify or not report a crime when there's a dead body involved. Looking at the statistics for murder and non-negligent manslaughter from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States seems to support the idea that the reduction is real--the rate has been cut in half since 1990, and the reduction is broadly similar to the reductions in other types of crime over that period as described by that article.
Local police departments and even universities are required to periodically report crime data to the FBI. Not doing so, or doing so incorrectly, is a big deal. There are DOJ investigators on my campus and the Dean of Students was forced out because we've been telling the FBI about 2-3 rapes a year when many female students can point to more like 10 in their social circles alone.
The FBI is not so much "measuring" crime but aggregating basically every police report ever written in the country in a huge database and then writing reports about interesting patterns and trends.
I don't know any more about stat manipulation than I learned on The Wire, but the gist of it seemed to be that they couldn't actually produce a long-term stable decline, even on paper. Instead, they could only make the stats fall at certain times, like during a mayoral race, and then they'd go back up. If stat manipulation was the true cause of the apparent decline in crime over the last several decades, you'd think the decline would accelerate during election years.
1) I've read about many other schools doing the same as your Dean, so I'm not sure the DOJ enforces those rules effectively.
2)
> The FBI is not so much "measuring" crime but aggregating basically every police report ever written in the country in a huge database and then writing reports about interesting patterns and trends.
I expect that the data-producing methods and execution vary greatly in our country's large number and variety of police departments. I hope the federal government does more than merely aggregate the data, or its value would be questionable.
There is currently a massive crackdown on campus sexual assault and underreporting is part of it at dozens of campuses. So, ongoing enforcement may have been lax, but the DOJ is hitting it and hitting it hard at the moment.
I don't know how much they would really differ. Every modern police department is going to write down what it does.
It looks like you read the article. Why did you disregard this quote?
> These trends aren’t caused by changes in our willingness to report crime to the police. We see an even more significant decline in violent crime in data derived from surveys asking people whether they’ve been the victims of certain crimes over the past year.
Sure, if you compare to the tail end of the crack wars. Compare to 1950 or 1900 or 1980 or... What does this prove exactly?
The perception of "safety" is also not only a function of "crimes per capita". "Blocks safe for a woman to walk through alone at night" or "total victimization rate" make just about as much sense. "Obviousness of safe / unsafe areas" is also a good one - if you have to have local knowledge of what is a "good neighbourhood" or not in order to avoid being victimized, obviously non-locals will develop a perception of the area as unsafe.
Wow, from the downvotes people seem really invested in particular choices of time horizon & measures of safety. Who knew?
You're partly right. The 1950s were particularly safe and crime is somewhat higher now than it was then (though not uniformly; you are safer in Houston today than in 1950, surprisingly). On the other hand, it was a bit higher at the beginning of the last century, which is not too surprising as the solve rate was much lower and so were sentences (an average of 10 years for murder in 1910, whereas by 2003 it's 85). A good reference on this subject is The collapse of American Criminal Justice by William Stuntz.
Your safety is a measure of how likely you are to be attacked, which is fundamentally a per capita measurement. If there are twice as many people and 10% more attacks, that means that the average person is less likely to be attacked.
No. Crimes per capita can obviously be concentrated in a smaller segment of the population (for instance, those that live in high crime areas). Half the population twice as frequently, or vice versa, looks the same in aggregate but not in perception.
And geographic concerns do matter. "I must live in this expensive area to avoid being mugged" drives a perception of unsafety even if you are not being mugged.
I guess it depends to what extent you think TV drives culture versus reflects it.
It is kind of amusing to look at certain old movies and see how much less-believable they've become, particularly the ones that implied urban crime was going to get much worse before getting better (if ever.)
Ex: Robocop, Judge Dredd, Escape from New York, the introductory portion of Demolition Man...
Although I rarely see it considered, one factor that may contribute to a decline in crime rates is flight. When people flee crime-ridden areas, crime rates should go down, but mainly as a side-effect of a worrisome trend. Might this be part of the explanation for the drop in crime? It seems plausible, but I've never seen a careful evaluation of the hypothesis.
Without bothering to actually look at the numbers, I suspect you are wrong. Flight was a big thing in the 50's through 80's (although it has continued in a few notable locations (Detroit, etc)). The 90s and 00's are best characterized as a reversal of flight though. Cities like NYC were rejuvenated, young successful people are once again moving into major cities.
One thing to consider is that there are certain parts of NY that can be considered very safe, whereas other parts are not. The same thing probably happens in Dallas and Houston, the difference being the Texas cities are driving cities so you would just drive through/around the dangerous parts, whereas in NY you would have to walk through them.
Even though I wish it were true, I'm not sure the decline in crime really indicates greater safety. For instance, one major contribution to the decrease in the murder rate is that people survive gunshot wounds much better than they used to. In terms of the human cost of violence that's actually great, but it's not exactly safety. And of course people have become much more safety conscious now, we drive safer cars, we walk around less, we don't let our kids out unattended, etc. All those things actually do avoid crime, and so reduce the amount of crime, but they don't increase safety.
Which is to say: our tolerance for risk has gone down, and behavior has changed because of that, but that doesn't (and rationally shouldn't!) affect our concern about crime. And perceptions are really about the concern about crime (something that actually affects the person being surveyed), not the belief in what crime exists (which only abstractly affects someone) – and it is not irrational that the concern remains steady or goes up even as actual crime rates go down. It may not be good or healthy that the concern remains steady, but it's not irrational.
The total violent crime rate has decreased by ~50% in the last 20 years. The rate of "Nonfatal Firearm Victimizations" has fallen by ~75% from it's 1990's peak:
Simpson's Paradox can also mess with these statistics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox – like, is crime decreasing because we are suburbanizing? And therefore, if we hold the community type constant, is crime decreasing? And so if you ask someone "is crime decreasing in your area of perception?" then someone can reasonably answer "no".
(There's also the possibility of a fallacy where everyone ratchets up their expectation – e.g., a person who moves to the city from the suburbs says crime increases because it probably has for them, but a person who moves to the suburbs from the city starts looking to media to make observations about their former neighborhood.)
The math doesn't add up, and that's not data being presented from the article about New Orleans, it's an opinion piece.
In 2009, there were 424 non-fatal shooting victims and 174 homicides in New Orleans. In 2013, there were 321 non-fatal shootings and 155 homicides.[1]
The population of New Orleans was 354,850 in 2009 and was 378,715 in 2013.[2]
So the total murder rate went from 49/100k to 41/100k (17% decrease) while the total non-fatal victimization rate went from 120/100k to 85/100k (30% decrease). To see whether or not better care made an impact, we can just multiply the number of injured by the difference in survival rates after the advanced trauma methods were introduced (14% vs. 19%). The number of non-fatal shootings would have decreased by 16, and the number of murders would have increased by the same amount. So the new rates would be 45/100k and 81/100k, still 8% and 33% improvements in the past 5 years.
Simpson's Paradox doesn't cut it either; young vs. old, rural vs. urban, big city vs. little city vs. small town, black vs. white vs. hispanic, West vs. Midwest vs. South --- All rates are down across the board.[3]
I'm not deeply wedded to this particular point about trauma care, I think increased risk adversity and security measures are more important to the perception of crime (and give a rational basis to a perception of the threat of crime). But this article is at least a bit more direct, and refers to the things I've read in the past (and some of those articles I admit probably contained false assertions): http://www.separatinghyperplanes.com/2013/07/can-medical-adv...
Per that article, the data supporting better trauma care is not particularly impressive, but it does seem like there is a discrepancy between the criminal reporting of assault with a firearm, and the medical reporting of injury from a firearm
Some good points, but if improved medical care were a major factor then we'd have to expect a corresponding uptick in attempted murder, which doesn't seem to be there.
I wondered if population growth also accounts for some of this, though by rough math, the US population has grown by 25% in the last 20 years... and this assumes that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes.
The wonderful thing about broad statistics, a decline in one area can mask increases in others. Here in Santa Cruz (city, not sure about county) lots of crime categories are up across the board. It is pretty darn noticeable.
It doesn't show any major trends upwards (or downwards) in the crime rate for Santa Cruz. Are there other sources of data on which you are referring?
I ask because it looks like you are being downvoted (I didn't downvote you), perhaps because your comment didn't come across like one with data behind it.
The site shows particular numbers, but having lived here 24+ years, the statistics don't reflect reality. The problem is, "petty theft" doesn't get written up, in most cases if it is under $1000 in loss, the police will not take a report. Bike theft? Well, good luck with that - if Paul Graham was to witness you jacking a $5k bike off of my car and he called the cops and the bike wasn't registered, the cops will not do anything. Thief tools on you and you are "checked out" by the cops, unless there is an outstanding warrant, you are let go.
There is a big local issue with actually "punishing" any petty crime. I saw the stats, but the reality is way out of whack with them mainly due to cops/courts/DAs not really enforcing things.
Crimes related to drug use -- heroin, meth, bath salts -- generally don't even get into the system. Take them to jail, they are out in a couple of hours max.
Even if crime is up in SC, it's almost guaranteed that some locale will have rising crime even in a nation of falling crime. It's just a stochastic process where the system boundaries used for reporting crime are more or less randomly determined. I'd be more surprised to hear that there was no such city in America with rising crime.
- Mass incarceration (usually credited with about 25% of the crime decline)
- More gun control (e.g., the 1994-2004 assault weapons ban)
- Less gun control (e.g., the rise of "shall-issue" concealed carry permits)
- Cultural change
- Banning of lead in automotive fuel [Nevin 1999]
Perhaps all of these mattered; perhaps none did. We don't really know.