The U.S. crime rate is still dropping, FBI data shows

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/crime-courts/us-crime-rate-still-dropping-says-fbi-rcna144100

by paulpauper • 2 years ago

56 82 2 years ago

Social media has improved awareness of crime, and this is where most people derive their intuitive measures of crime.

paulpauper• 2 years ago

Yeah, footage of crime goes viral, but this also creates perception that crime is worse than it really is. given 200 million Americans with a smart phone and social media accounts, there will always be crime somewhere being recorded. This does not mean the perps in those videos do not get caught later even if they appear in the video to have gotten away.

api• 2 years ago

The media has always greatly amplified perception of crime.

In the 80s and 90s for instance daytime TV convinced parents that pedophile abductors were stealing kids everywhere when in reality these crimes were and are statistically extremely rare.

kube-system5• 2 years ago

That's my point. Everyone and their dog has a ring doorbell now. Property crime was definitely worse in the 80s and 90s, but you'd only hear about it through the grapevine.

abduhl• 2 years ago

From the data we see that violent crime has dropped across the board but property crime is up 3% between Q4 2022 and Q4 2023 for cities with a population of a million or more. The article asks “Why does the public think it’s going up?” Well, because it is in major cities.

I won’t even mention the additional factors of the 24 hour news cycle, social media, and people losing faith in officials prosecuting crimes like shoplifting or car jacking leading to less reporting. The raw data says property crime is up in major cities, and property crime is the crime that makes people feel unsafe or that there is disorder (as the “expert” in the article refers to).

kube-system5• 2 years ago

Yet, a pretty consistent majority of people, regardless of where they live, say they think crime is increasing locally.

https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/NOZAB/3/#

ceejayoz• 2 years ago

Sure, but the same is true for angels. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/nearly-7-in-10-u-s-adult...

wolverine87611• 2 years ago

property crime is up 3% between Q4 2022 and Q4 2023

I doubt people would notice 3%, though arguably it could have been 'too high' to begin with.

silisili2• 2 years ago

I'm not going to argue the statistics because obviously I don't have all the data, but I do have to wonder how much (if any) attribution goes to people giving up on the police?

"Why bother, they won't do anything" has become a rather common phrase I've heard a lot in the past few years, from family to random retail workers, but I'm unsure if that sentiment is growing or not.

* Adding due to replies, what I thought may be obvious - the phrase above is never referring to murders, usually property crimes.

MisterBastahrd2• 2 years ago

Sure, that makes more sense than the fact that most people who are at the age where one would normally conduct criminal mischief are now glued to their phones. Murder and violent crimes are both dropping year over year, too. Not sure how you wave away murder rates because people have given up on police.

downrightmike3• 2 years ago

Its not because they are glued to their phones, its because those kids that parents didn't want to have, weren't had and didn't become latchkey kids and then criminals.

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/abortion-and-crime-revisite...

WarOnPrivacy• 2 years ago

I do have to wonder how much (if any) attribution goes to people giving up on the police?

If so, they've been giving up on the police for at least 2 decades.

    Violent crime has been falling since early 90s https://www.statista.com/statistics/191219/reported-violent-crime-rate-in-the-usa-since-1990/

    Property crime has been falling since early 90s https://www.deepsentinel.com/blogs/home-security/residential-property-crime-in-the-united-states/

roywiggins3• 2 years ago

Murders, at least, tend to be reported regardless of people's confidence that the police will solve the case.

hmm372• 2 years ago

But there's a huge difference between murder and petty crime. Just because murders decrease because e.g. less lead in the environment, doesn't necessarily mean that petty crime also decreased. This doesn't pass the necessary/sufficient test.

RhysU• 2 years ago

True! That could be chalked up (yuk yuk) to needing to otherwise dispose of a dead body.

thinkingtoilet• 2 years ago

My friend got robbed in NYC. The only reason he called the police was to get a police report for insurance reasons. They came 8 hours after he called. Obviously they're not going to do anything about it. If it wasn't needed for insurance, there would be absolutely no reason to call them.

supergeek1332• 2 years ago

That's the interesting bit for me.

I DO believe people are calling the police less for crime, even violent crime.

However, how do you have an official source of "I decided not to call the cops".

persolb• 2 years ago

A coworker of mine was punched on NYCT. Went to the cop in the station, who did nothing, and was sore for a week. This is a case where it was ‘reported’, but the cop said they couldn’t do anything if he wasn’t seriously hurt. My other NY coworkers have similar stories of other people they know.

Maybe random minor violence is up, but major violence is down… but the number of people I’ve heard of getting assaulted has definitely increased since COVID.

The number of ‘we can’t do anything’ stories I’ve heard have skyrocketed. If anything pre-Covid cops were to quick to go after people. I got jumped after high school by kids I didn’t know and just got a black eye; the cops went and roughed up the gang of guys based purely on me saying ‘that’s them’ as we drove past.

hotdogscout• 2 years ago

"Why bother, they won't do anything" has become a rather common phrase I've heard a lot in the past few years, from family to random retail workers, but I'm unsure if that sentiment is growing or not.

What kind of crime are people so commonly being victims of around you?

silisili2• 2 years ago

Edited original comment, but each of the instances I was thinking of was related to theft, whether personal or shoplifting.

creer2• 2 years ago

assaults

booleandilemma• 2 years ago

I reported a theft of a high value item to the police once. I went to the their office, gave details of what happened, and I never heard back from them. I won't bother making another report.

The NYPD struggles to find subway shooters*, investigating a theft is probably something beyond their abilities.

* https://abcnews.go.com/US/nyc-police-search-gunman-brooklyn-...

vondur• 2 years ago

Here in SoCal crime is the worst we've seen since the 90's. Property crime is rampant, tons of shootings, assaults etc, just in my local area. Not only that, DA's are not prosecuting criminals, therefore police aren't arresting people due to this.

robertlagrant• 2 years ago

Can you cite a source that shows it's the worst since the 90s?

uejfiweun• 2 years ago

Isn't this guy quite literally a primary source?

moomoo114• 2 years ago

Didn’t a lot of cities either redefine crime or just stopped recording?

I’m in Bay Area and SF basically over the past decade or so has made it okay to commit crime.

And if I question anything I’m the bad guy.

wolverine87611• 2 years ago

And if I question anything I’m the bad guy.

That's surprising to hear, because people with your approximate beliefs dominate the public conversation, have recalled the DA, and are spending large amounts of money to take over SF politics.

Why is it necessary to play the victim? Are you afraid of people disagreeing?

moomoo114• 2 years ago

People on the street vs tweets and actions of tech billionaires.

And yes I’m afraid of the communists who run around in SF condoning actual international terrorists, and group up to defend local criminals almost on the daily from facing consequences for their malbehavior.

pton_xd• 2 years ago

I was linked an article [0] claiming that "the federal government has two ways of measuring crime, the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program. The former asks around 240,000 Americans if they’ve been the victim of a crime in the last year whereas the latter relies on crimes reported to police in a given year and shared with the bureau.

A gap has emerged between the two measures. More people are telling the Bureau of Justice Statistics that they’ve been victimized, but the FBI is reporting fewer crimes."

The article goes on to say that "the UCR reported that violent crime fell by 2% between 2021 and 2022" and yet "the NCVS found that the number of people saying they were the victims of violent crimes increased by 42.4% between 2021 and 2022, rising from 16.5 victimizations per 1000 people to 23.5 victimizations per 1000."

Does anyone have more information on the accuracy of that claim?

As a personal anecdote, my car was broken into last year and I did not bother filing a police report.

[0] https://dailycaller.com/2024/04/25/media-outlets-misrepresen...

wolverine87611• 2 years ago

An interesting analysis, but do you have links to the primary sources or to a more credible source than the Daily Caller?

As a personal anecdote, my car was broken into last year and I did not bother filing a police report.

What does that represent? Not only are you just one person, people have been behaving like that for generations, not just the last 4 years.

notadev• 2 years ago

What would you hope to gain from a “more reliable” source when the DailyCaller article links to the sources of its claims? Do you not even bother to read something if it’s from a source you don’t frequently read?

walkabilitee3• 2 years ago

Between 2021 and 2022 the rate of violent victimization reporting to police dropped from 46% to 42%. Data is not yet available for 2023:

https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/criminal-victimizat...

The pre-pandemic, pre-George Floyd norm was around 46-47%:

https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/criminal-victimizat...

No statistically significant change was detected in the percentages of violent crime reported to police from 2014 (46%) to 2015 (47%)

supergeek1332• 2 years ago

How does one have an official source of "A crime was done to me but I just decided to not call the police"

simplyluke• 2 years ago

At least in Seattle it's become notably more common in the past handful of years for people to not bother reporting many crimes, knowing that the police will not even show up for most of them.

This was not true 5-10 years ago.

ajross• 2 years ago

Local and state level crime reporting tracks the FBI's data though. Also the Daily Caller is (as you might expect from a partisan source) spinning the data pretty badly. Here's the actual report they linked to justify that "42.4% increase": https://bjs.ojp.gov/document/cv22.pdf

Look at the chart. It's been basically basically flat, with some noise, for the past 16-17 years. But indeed, there's a fairly big noise bump at the very last data point. (Or alternatively you could look at 2022 as a return to the mean following two years of depressed crime statistics during the pandemic?)

It's cherry-picking, basically.

jandrewrogers• 2 years ago

While also anecdotal, I know of multiple cases in Seattle of serious crime not being reported in recent years because of a widespread and often valid perception that the police no longer respond to most crimes. People complained about the police pre-COVID but at least they usually showed up, eventually. Whether or not it is true, there is definitely a perception that calling the police has reliably become a waste of time in most cases for crimes they used to respond to, and people's behavior has changed to reflect that.

creer2• 2 years ago

Same here for San Francisco

medellin• 2 years ago

I know the perception is that the police don’t care anymore. Bo surprise these are diverging and that no one trusts anything put out by the government anymore anyway

TMWNN• 2 years ago

As a personal anecdote, my car was broken into last year and I did not bother filing a police report.

"The thing I have noticed is when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. There's something wrong with the way you are measuring it". —Jeff Bezos <https://sports.yahoo.com/amazon-ceo-jeff-bezos-explains-2123...>

delichon2• 2 years ago

The article takes the data as gospel but the sources are not disinterested. There are significant trends in both the probability of crime and of a crime being reported. And there have been recent significant changes to how those stats are collected. If you see a clear signal in the data it may be because you haven't had a chance to spelunk into the details.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/urban-crime-wave

runako• 2 years ago

the sources are not disinterested

The link you provide is from a political advocacy group largely funded by corporate donors. The front page of the journal principally comprises anti-diversity & crime trutherism articles. It's conservative, but even that conservative bent is narrowly focused to agitate against the fall in crime rates and against any diversity effort.

This is not a disinterested source.

delichon2• 2 years ago

I agree, I offer it for balance. If you can find a disinterested source I'd be interested in their findings.

aantix3• 2 years ago

Less kids playing outside.

wolverine87611• 2 years ago

That is perception of crime, not actual crime.

aantix3• 2 years ago

No. The kids literally aren’t outside. So they have less interaction. They commit less crime.

paxys• 2 years ago

Data shows that, but feelings don't. It's always going to be a losing battle.

epistasis• 2 years ago

It depends on who's in office, and who the media and political groups want to rile up.

a_wild_dandan• 2 years ago

You're describing symptoms as the disease. People elect officials, sustain media outlets that support their viewership's confirmation biases, and organize by tribal beliefs. People are the messy, complicated root cause. New symptoms will always emerge, regardless of how much focus/treatment they get. Symptoms can sometimes look like a cabal. But they aren't. The root is normal people.

knallfrosch• 2 years ago

Sure, it's all feelings. We just need to tell people they're actually safe! Let's get the data out there!

walkabilitee3• 2 years ago

Crime reporting is down too, especially in cities which have progressive prosecutors and significant police staffing problems such as Portland, OR, Pittsburgh, PA, and Burlington, VT. I'll wait for the 2023 National Criminal Victimization Survey before declaring victory on this one:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Crime_Victimization_S...

That survey gathers data from participants directly instead of relying on reports collected via law enforcement. As of the 2022 report, the latest period for which such data is available, violent victimization was rising:

https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/list?series_filter=...

downrightmike3• 2 years ago

Crime goes down when unwanted kids that would have become criminals aren't born. https://freakonomics.com/podcast/abortion-and-crime-revisite...

Expect regressive states to have an explosion in crime over the next few decades.

wolverine87611• 2 years ago

In my experience, people who don't read serious news almost all repeat neoreactionary talking points (including chaos in the cities, etc.). I was even talking to someone from Ghana the other day who said people in Ghana also repeat those things about the US - e.g., how crazy NYC is.

The correlation between neoreactionary disinformation campaigns (e.g., chaos in cities was the theme of the 2020 GOP convention, though overshadowed by Covid) and people's beliefs are too great to think it's coincidence.

The neoreactionary influence campaigns dominate the country and much of the world, IME. While the mainstream incumbent powers are living in a fantasy world of their now-historical world, a world where the serious news media being central to public conversation. They don't realize that most of the real influence is happening over social media, through these disinformation campaigns.

I suspect the upcoming election will be a devestating loss - but not an awakening. Incumbents (think of Blackberry in technology) will crew their ship to the bottom of the ocean.

matheweis• 2 years ago

A study posted here yesterday, had the interesting statistic that the “clearance rate” i.e. percent of crimes solved by the police - when reported - is down drastically in recent years, a trend that seems to have started long before covid:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40223240 (note, flagged, although not clear to me why)

This might explain part of the growing frustration and questions about the veracity of the reporting data.

offtrail• 2 years ago

Yup. Crime numbers go down when you ignore crimes.

havblue• 2 years ago

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/oct/22/us-crime-sta...

Just to point out, there's the subject of whether crime is reported. And then there's the subject of whether local agencies pass along that information to the FBI. So the FBI stats even on murder aren't complete.

The U.S. crime rate is still dropping, FBI data shows

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