Americans and Misunderstanding of Crime Trends

History and mathematics. Two topics Americans hate. Why People Misperceive Crime Trends (Chicago Is Not the Murder Capital) - The New York Times

This is a story from the New York Times, so even when they are talking about statistics, they do cherry pick some of those numbers. And the numbers are from 2020, which was not an average year in any sense, including for crime. (People who are not riding on subway trains will not be mugged in subway stations, etc.) But somehow they don't seem to cover any of the "Mostly Peaceful" protests (e.g. riots and looting) that took place all over the country last year. I'm sure it was an oversight.

So while we get the "Crime is Down" refrain for 2020, we get no mention of Carjacking. And aside from a graph (included below) showing how much worse things were in the 1980s and 1990s, there is no discussion in the NY Times about what might have caused the crime rates to fall so dramatically in the 1990s. I talk a bit about that below.

So why is it that people are clueless about real crime statistics? Part of this is the fault of the Media. Chicago and New York and Los Angeles get more national media attention than Saint Louis and Baltimore and New Orleans. Part of this that Math is Hard, and statitisics involve things like long division, and knowing how to calculate rates from raw numbers and population figures. And if the media focused too closely on how bad things were in the 1980s, people might want to know ha

A 3rd reason they get things so wrong is also the fault of the 24 hour media. They want you scared, because it is easier to control you when you are scared.

First we should consider the historic crime trends, since that is actually the bigger story.

A Pew Research report in 2016 found that “voters are usually more likely to say crime is up than down, regardless of what official statistics show.” For decades, Gallup has asked people whether they think there is more or less crime in the U.S. compared with the year before. The question has been asked almost yearly since 1996, and every year except for 2001 the public — usually by overwhelming margins — has said crime has increased.

The truth is that murder was near historic lows 5 or 10 years ago.

So, what happened in the late 1980s and early 1990s to drive the murder-rate down so quickly? Two things. The advent of "Shall Issue" Concealed Carry laws, and Broken Windows Policing.

Though Florida wasn't the first state to have "Shall Issue" concealed carry licensing, when they passed that legislation in 1987, they started the modern wave of reform of self-defense laws. And started a wave of Leftist and Media (but I repeat myself) pearl clutching, and predictions of "blood will run in the streets."

Broken Windows Policing was first mentioned in 1982 in the March issue of The Atlantic magazine. It was adopted by Police Commissioner William Bratton in NYC during the 1990s.

While correlation doesn't equal causation, for the causation argument you can see the work done by John Lott in general and his book More Guns, Less Crime.

Next let us consider which cities are actually the most dangerous.

 

As I said at the top, the largest cities get the most national attention. I spend a lot of time reading about, and writing about, Chicago. That is mostly because it was home, for a long time.

A recent New York Times quiz revealed some common misperceptions about crime trends, the most widely held of which involved Chicago. Readers were asked to rank Chicago nationally in murder rate. The options were first, third, fifth or seventh. Most picked “first,” and only 8 percent chose the right answer (seventh). [SNIP]

(St. Louis, Baltimore, New Orleans and Memphis are examples of large cities that have tended to have higher murder rates than Chicago in recent years, whether measuring by city limit or metro area. Chicago is larger than any of those, and so would tend to have higher totals.)

I am not sure if that order implies the cities with the highest rates of murder or not; the NYT doesn't say. Baltimore has a much smaller population than Chicago, and so they have many fewer murders, but more murders per 100,000 population.