The rate of gunshot homicides has stayed remarkably stable, and in many areas of the US has decreased since the 1970s.
In that time, due to massive improvements in trauma care, the likelihood of surviving a gunshot has improved by over 500%.
So, more than five times as many people are being shot each year, but because the homicide stats are down, everybody should relax and stop noticing things.
There’s another possibility here that you alluded to without fully saying it. Namely that the data themselves might be fudged in various ways. Reporting, especially, is likely to be down if the expectation is “they won’t do anything”. Which you highlight as the generally accepted truth in society. If the police and home office have incentives to lower the overall rate and not just the clearance rate (or both) they will come up with creative ways to do this. Data fraud is rampant in science, why not in policing?
"If I took my new car back to the dealer because the engine failed, and their response was 'well actually sir, engine failures have fallen every year since 1993 and are close to a historic low,' my response would not be, 'Oh of course, silly me! I should be grateful to live in such a wonderful age!' This is a completely insane approach to customer satisfaction: people’s right to complain about a problem is not somehow abrogated by the fact that it used to be worse in the past."
Sure. This would be a great point, *if you had actually experienced an engine failure.* Not if your car was running fine, but you were terrified by misinformation about an unprecedented wave of engine failures.
But it isn't "misinformation" if there are visible signs of crime "everywhere" (see supermarkets locking away expensive products etc). You can say that the data tells a different story but the data does not match the "lived experience" of many; doesn't make it misinformation (which is a very stupid concept, anyway).
You don't think distinguishing real, true information from misleading falsehoods is important?
Supermarkets locking away products is not a "visible sign of crime," it's an indicator of an attitude *about* crime, or about their customers - which may or may not be misinformed.
"Morrisons don't know their own 'wastage' rates and have unnecessarily spent money to make life harder for their actual customers" is one hell of a take...
No. But there are two bits of information which have validity. Crime may be down in general, but if I am a victim of crime/I know a victim of crime/I witness a crime on my street I don't especially care. It's the difference between the generality and the specific. I am not misinformed if a) I care very much about my specific experience and b) I receive data which jars which my knowledge/is at best counter-intuitive with I am seeing around me.
It's the same as comforting an unemployed miner in the 80s with the news that the Lawson Boom is happening.
Put another way, why is the academic study of numbers more real and valuable than my experience? It isn't misinformed to say that the data conflicts with what I see, so I choose to believe my own eyes or believe that the data isn't capturing the whole picture.
Your own experience is real, but it is individual, anecdotal; its value to the wider world is not nothing, but it is limited. An academic study of numbers includes and combines your real experience with those of many many other people - experiences as real as yours - across a wider area or across time, in a systematic way. This is just a lot more informative about what's really going on, and more predictive of the experience others are likely to have.
Except this is where we disagree. The data is not "a lot more informative about what's really going on" because the data is national and my experience is local and I don't give two nuts about the people who have not been victims of crime, if I myself was a victim of crime.
I agree that at a national level policies should be base don the data of the national experience, but at the same time responding to people's concerns about crime (and probably more accurately the sense that "wrong'uns are getting away with it" - which is, I suspect - people's real concern) but saying 'don't worry, lots of people are not victims' is rubbish.
Again, by analogy, the response to people laid off by their factory is not "yes, but overall economic growth is rising (so don't worry about it)"
Data can be at any scale. There is no scale of public policy at which one data point (such as one person's experience on one day) is more true or useful than many data points (including the one).
Look, nobody is saying "don't worry, lots of people are not victims." Nobody is denying the experience of crime victims. What data advocates are saying is, you don't make good policy choices at any scale if you misunderstand the reality because you have severely limited information. The best policy answer for the laid-off factory workers depends very much on what the surrounding economy is doing!
Okay, but isn't this a policing/institution problem? The people who say that crime is at an all time low and want criminal justice reform to shift from the punitive to the restorative, aren't wrong... Yes people feel crime is bad and yes police are rubbish at solving crimes, but then they should be joining the side of the people wanting reform. I would say that's where this is where media steps in. If the media rails against new sentencing guidelines and police hiring reform (e.g) and plays up crime (it's worth noting that crime is inherently "news worthy", whereas absence of crime is not) then the public may well get the wrong policy ideas. It seems like this puts the quote unquote blame on people who are just describing reality, and who, in general, are probably sympathetic to your wider thoughts on crime prevention too...
Very interesting and well written piece. Some extra information could be helpful. In 2010 we had a competent professional police force and effective prosecution and courts. This has been fundamentally crippled over 15 years. Your article could have used this information to support your conclusions.
It seems a bit odd to suggest that the actual evidence should be ignored because, well, feelings. Fear of crime is just incredibly easy to exploit & we live in a world in which every fear is monetised so obviously fear of crime is catnip for fear harvesting algorithms. Yet any attempt to reassure people that crime is lower than it used to be is dismissed as complacency: so let’s shout it out: Old People are LESS likely to be victims of crime than younger people and young men are the group MOST likely to be victims of physical attacks. But this is bad for the algorithm harvesters so it is barely mentioned and old ladies continue to fear something that is vanishingly unlikely to affect them.
Yeah, I think there's a whole other piece to be written on how the police sits within other institutions, the funding and effectiveness of them, and how they collectively influence public opinion. Like you rightly point out the court system, but also there's a lot of 'para-police' stuff from businesses, contractors and institutions that are 'police-adjacent' that I think the public (rightly) conflate as 'the authorities'.
Isn’t this also about how we ask about the perception and experience of crime. This mix means there are numerous places with low crime rates where the perception of crime is high based on worries, media and general sense of things not being as they were - rich, affluent, remote, quiet older age population. Compared to those places where most of the crime is actually happening - urban, poor, underprivileged, under resourced etc….. the police are absent completely from the first area and overwhelmed and ineffective in the second as they can’t fix the mess. It’s not the police that control crime rates. They pick up the pieces in their under funded way…. But let’s not forget they are putting a lot of people in prison, not all of them for failing to pay tv license and speeding! Crime is a vast spectrum from despoiling the local environment to corporate greed. When it pays crime happens. When it’s just setting fire to a bin in a park it says more about how we run society than the inane behaviour of poorly parented youths.
Think you're making a category error on wallet versus phone. Wallets also used to contain your whole life. Don't think you can just assert losing your phone now is more distressing than losing your wallet then.
Same with the "kids being shits not being counted" that's not a new problem, that's also down a huge amount since the 1990s, so it doesn't make sense as an explanation why fear of crime is elevated.
Well basically if I recall when I looked at the stats: crime may be down but crime solving has reached record lows - the clearence rate for murder in NYC is around 56% for example and murder is among the crimes that are most frequently solved. The net result of this is that people feel like the crime that exists is so much worse because there’s no redress for anything. That and having to unlock stuff at the store makes me feel like a criminal and that the entire city is going to pieces as it were.
The rate of gunshot homicides has stayed remarkably stable, and in many areas of the US has decreased since the 1970s.
In that time, due to massive improvements in trauma care, the likelihood of surviving a gunshot has improved by over 500%.
So, more than five times as many people are being shot each year, but because the homicide stats are down, everybody should relax and stop noticing things.
Many such cases.
There’s another possibility here that you alluded to without fully saying it. Namely that the data themselves might be fudged in various ways. Reporting, especially, is likely to be down if the expectation is “they won’t do anything”. Which you highlight as the generally accepted truth in society. If the police and home office have incentives to lower the overall rate and not just the clearance rate (or both) they will come up with creative ways to do this. Data fraud is rampant in science, why not in policing?
"If I took my new car back to the dealer because the engine failed, and their response was 'well actually sir, engine failures have fallen every year since 1993 and are close to a historic low,' my response would not be, 'Oh of course, silly me! I should be grateful to live in such a wonderful age!' This is a completely insane approach to customer satisfaction: people’s right to complain about a problem is not somehow abrogated by the fact that it used to be worse in the past."
Sure. This would be a great point, *if you had actually experienced an engine failure.* Not if your car was running fine, but you were terrified by misinformation about an unprecedented wave of engine failures.
But it isn't "misinformation" if there are visible signs of crime "everywhere" (see supermarkets locking away expensive products etc). You can say that the data tells a different story but the data does not match the "lived experience" of many; doesn't make it misinformation (which is a very stupid concept, anyway).
You don't think distinguishing real, true information from misleading falsehoods is important?
Supermarkets locking away products is not a "visible sign of crime," it's an indicator of an attitude *about* crime, or about their customers - which may or may not be misinformed.
"Morrisons don't know their own 'wastage' rates and have unnecessarily spent money to make life harder for their actual customers" is one hell of a take...
No. But there are two bits of information which have validity. Crime may be down in general, but if I am a victim of crime/I know a victim of crime/I witness a crime on my street I don't especially care. It's the difference between the generality and the specific. I am not misinformed if a) I care very much about my specific experience and b) I receive data which jars which my knowledge/is at best counter-intuitive with I am seeing around me.
It's the same as comforting an unemployed miner in the 80s with the news that the Lawson Boom is happening.
Put another way, why is the academic study of numbers more real and valuable than my experience? It isn't misinformed to say that the data conflicts with what I see, so I choose to believe my own eyes or believe that the data isn't capturing the whole picture.
Your own experience is real, but it is individual, anecdotal; its value to the wider world is not nothing, but it is limited. An academic study of numbers includes and combines your real experience with those of many many other people - experiences as real as yours - across a wider area or across time, in a systematic way. This is just a lot more informative about what's really going on, and more predictive of the experience others are likely to have.
Except this is where we disagree. The data is not "a lot more informative about what's really going on" because the data is national and my experience is local and I don't give two nuts about the people who have not been victims of crime, if I myself was a victim of crime.
I agree that at a national level policies should be base don the data of the national experience, but at the same time responding to people's concerns about crime (and probably more accurately the sense that "wrong'uns are getting away with it" - which is, I suspect - people's real concern) but saying 'don't worry, lots of people are not victims' is rubbish.
Again, by analogy, the response to people laid off by their factory is not "yes, but overall economic growth is rising (so don't worry about it)"
Data can be at any scale. There is no scale of public policy at which one data point (such as one person's experience on one day) is more true or useful than many data points (including the one).
Look, nobody is saying "don't worry, lots of people are not victims." Nobody is denying the experience of crime victims. What data advocates are saying is, you don't make good policy choices at any scale if you misunderstand the reality because you have severely limited information. The best policy answer for the laid-off factory workers depends very much on what the surrounding economy is doing!
Okay, but isn't this a policing/institution problem? The people who say that crime is at an all time low and want criminal justice reform to shift from the punitive to the restorative, aren't wrong... Yes people feel crime is bad and yes police are rubbish at solving crimes, but then they should be joining the side of the people wanting reform. I would say that's where this is where media steps in. If the media rails against new sentencing guidelines and police hiring reform (e.g) and plays up crime (it's worth noting that crime is inherently "news worthy", whereas absence of crime is not) then the public may well get the wrong policy ideas. It seems like this puts the quote unquote blame on people who are just describing reality, and who, in general, are probably sympathetic to your wider thoughts on crime prevention too...
Very interesting and well written piece. Some extra information could be helpful. In 2010 we had a competent professional police force and effective prosecution and courts. This has been fundamentally crippled over 15 years. Your article could have used this information to support your conclusions.
It seems a bit odd to suggest that the actual evidence should be ignored because, well, feelings. Fear of crime is just incredibly easy to exploit & we live in a world in which every fear is monetised so obviously fear of crime is catnip for fear harvesting algorithms. Yet any attempt to reassure people that crime is lower than it used to be is dismissed as complacency: so let’s shout it out: Old People are LESS likely to be victims of crime than younger people and young men are the group MOST likely to be victims of physical attacks. But this is bad for the algorithm harvesters so it is barely mentioned and old ladies continue to fear something that is vanishingly unlikely to affect them.
Yeah, I think there's a whole other piece to be written on how the police sits within other institutions, the funding and effectiveness of them, and how they collectively influence public opinion. Like you rightly point out the court system, but also there's a lot of 'para-police' stuff from businesses, contractors and institutions that are 'police-adjacent' that I think the public (rightly) conflate as 'the authorities'.
Isn’t this also about how we ask about the perception and experience of crime. This mix means there are numerous places with low crime rates where the perception of crime is high based on worries, media and general sense of things not being as they were - rich, affluent, remote, quiet older age population. Compared to those places where most of the crime is actually happening - urban, poor, underprivileged, under resourced etc….. the police are absent completely from the first area and overwhelmed and ineffective in the second as they can’t fix the mess. It’s not the police that control crime rates. They pick up the pieces in their under funded way…. But let’s not forget they are putting a lot of people in prison, not all of them for failing to pay tv license and speeding! Crime is a vast spectrum from despoiling the local environment to corporate greed. When it pays crime happens. When it’s just setting fire to a bin in a park it says more about how we run society than the inane behaviour of poorly parented youths.
Recommending “more education” as the solution to any political problem is generally an admission you don't know what to do.
Think you're making a category error on wallet versus phone. Wallets also used to contain your whole life. Don't think you can just assert losing your phone now is more distressing than losing your wallet then.
Same with the "kids being shits not being counted" that's not a new problem, that's also down a huge amount since the 1990s, so it doesn't make sense as an explanation why fear of crime is elevated.
"Crime is down, but Morrisons have locked away booze" is a hell of a paradox
Yeah, and again it’s an incredibly visible sign of failure
Tbh, it makes "experts" look silly since presumbably they are also aware of the world in which they live.
Well basically if I recall when I looked at the stats: crime may be down but crime solving has reached record lows - the clearence rate for murder in NYC is around 56% for example and murder is among the crimes that are most frequently solved. The net result of this is that people feel like the crime that exists is so much worse because there’s no redress for anything. That and having to unlock stuff at the store makes me feel like a criminal and that the entire city is going to pieces as it were.
Exactly this, especially when the price for this ‘improvement’ is mass surveillance