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@proxystudio.eth
I've lived in major american cities across the country for my entire life during that time period, crime has steadily declined. on the data side there isn't really disagreement about that. what explains the widespread sentiment that crime is rising? why do so many people believe that cities, in general, are overrun by crime and underpoliced? most interesting to me is that people across regions, demographics, political affiliation are extremely concerned about U.S. (national) crime & routinely think its worse than the year before. but those same respondents, again across the board, are far less worried about crime's seriousness in their local area. they still think its worse than before. it's almost accepted wisdom at this point. what explains the gap in data & sentiment? and perceptions of local crime (not bad but more than before) vs. national crime (bad & getting worse!)
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@we
How do you prove crime underreporting has increased over the years? I understand the data shows crime is down as a whole. It's hard to reconcile this dissonance when you see people get robbed by migrants on mopeds irl, police not do shit, or even bother to take a report. It's understandable why people don't even bother to call police. I see mentally ill / homeless people go apeshit on normal bystanders all the time on subways and police don't do shit. You see mentally ill / homeless people everywhere in NYC now and inevitable assume it's worse all over the place after seeing this behavior It's all anecdotal. It is true that we have more information than ever and news or apps like citizen, nextdoor, and neighborhood subreddits really amplify small data points. There are a lot of incentives for the data to be conservative. What incentives exist for them to be accurate? https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-media-say-crime-is-going-down-dont-believe-it-e5b07784
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@proxystudio.eth
seems like if crime were to have increased since 1993 we'd have a huge amount of data demonstrating that, but I think what you describe can all be true (and not good!) without crime rates increasing. here are some incentives for crime stats to be liberal (ie higher than they actually are): - budgets for police depts, prisons, other law enforcement agencies are set based on 'demand' for these services. more crime, more demand, bigger budgets - politicians who run on explicitly "tough on crime" platforms would obviously have an incentive to portray crime as worse than before. as the data shows, people generally think crime is bad (getting worse!) no matter what the reality is. we're fearful. this ia great for politicians (across the aisle, both parties play to this) - if the public were to realize crime was at a 50 year low, what else would. change? what is downstream of that? I've witnessed violent crime, I've witnessed homeless people harassing people on the subway. that doesn't mean that crime is rising
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@we
Oh. To clarify, I do not think crime has increased since 1993. If your argument is against people who believe 1993 was safer than 2024 then yes, I agree with you. I definitely don't speak for any stats or experience outside of NYC! I believe crime here is drastically lower since 1993, but I believe we hit a low point somewhere during Deblasio's term (2014-2022), not counting the weird edge case pandemic year, and have been trending back up ever since. I think the point about budgets is valid in theory, but police budgets have constantly been going up even with the reported crime stats decreasing YoY so I think it's hard to argue that it actually matters: https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/2024-04/figure%204_1.png / https://ibo.nyc.ny.us/RevenueSpending/nypd.html Don't think it makes sense for incumbent politicians to force police departments to report stats as higher than they are, considering it would make them look bad. Underreporting would reinforce the idea they're tough on crime.
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@we
> I've witnessed violent crime, I've witnessed homeless people harassing people on the subway. that doesn't mean that crime is rising Yes, true. I said this because the frequency of these situations have increased in recent years during my 37 years in NYC. It was certainly worse in the 90s though. I also viscerally responded to your post because I see some variation of this in the NYTimes every several months over the last several years and it triggers me every time https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/04/nyregion/new-york-crime-bernhard-goetz.html
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