What's up with the disconnect between the media's take on crime and actual crime stats

The data is irrefutable that long term trends of crime are going steadily down. Yet people have the perception that it’s going up. Why? Because there has been an intentional campaign to make crime much more salient in everyones’ minds. I’ll come back to that in a moment.

First, the data: yes, some crime in some places has gone up recently; however, the long term trends are very clear. Violent crime continues to fall in the United States. Between 2012 and 2021, the rate of violent victimization (sexual assault, robbery, aggravated assault, and simple assault) declined from 26.1 to 16.5 incidents per 1,000 people. This data comes from the Department of Justice. Note that while total violent victimization (an estimate of the amount of violence that is actually happening) remained steady from 2020 to 2021, reports to police went up slightly, which is what gets reported in the news. Side note: less than half of violent crimes are reported to the police, due to factors like victims lacking faith that the system can deliver them any justice. By contrast, survivors of crime report strong satisfaction after well-run restorative justice practices, implying that this is a better solution for everyone than police crackdowns. But, I digress: 

There are numerous charts like this that all show the same trends. It is an objective fact. 

Second, the media: the chart below shows the spike in Fox News reporting on crime. We can see that there is a strong effort to push fear of crime leading up to the midterms, which is a common tactic. This comes from Philip Bump’s excellent recent analysis in the Washington Post, where he delves into the relationship between media reporting and crime perceptions. 

Bloomberg looked at this issue in NYC over the summer, and fund a similar spike in coverage that did not match the underlying crime statistics at all:  

Our problem is that people do not believe their eyes looking at this data, because there is a ton of anecdotal discourse, elevated by motivated media sites like Fox, that push a powerful fear-based narrative. The massive amount of attention on the issue is making it loom very large, which leads to snap decision making. Is the murder rate unacceptably high? Yes. Do we need solutions? Yes! Is hysterical fear-based rhetoric going to lead to solutions that work? Absolutely not. If we are interested in actually solving violence and increasing safety, we need to pay attention to what is working, which I’ve reported on regularly in these memos – solutions like violence interruption, investments in housing and cash assistance (aka guaranteed income), and similar. Instead, people are reaching for answers that have been proven to fail time and again. 

One thing we can all do is read and share information about what is working, so the many people in our circles can focus on solutions, instead of politicized knee-jerk reactions that are going to cause decades of harm to communities. If you take nothing else from this newsletter, please focus on the solutions section that I include in my news update posts (like this one), and consider sharing that section with your friends.