March 2024
US stats show violent crime dramatically falling, so why is there a rising clash with perception?
"I don't believe the statistics," said Auriol Sonia Morris, a Trump supporter.
According to a Forbes magazine study released this month on the most dangerous states in America, South Carolina ranks eighth with a crime rate of 4.91 violent crimes per every 1,000 residents. Still, an annual report published in November by the South Carolina State Law Enforcement Division found overall violent crime dropped 2.6% from 2021 to 2022, including a 12% decrease in homicides.
...
"This is a long-term phenomenon. Crime has decreased since the middle of Bill Clinton’s first term precipitously," Lavine told ABC News. "It isn’t a simple story of linear decline from whenever it started to right now. It was until the pandemic and then it spiked, and now it’s on the way back down to that baseline where you would predict if there were no pandemic. But it is one of the very long-term misperceptions that Americans have."
It could have something to do with what I mentioned in my previous post.
There were two different data sources they used to rely on in tandem for a few years
The NIBRS (which was showing a slight decrease)
The NCVS (which was showing increases in certain crimes)
The put a 3-year pause on the NCVS in 2022 for re-instrumentation and it won't be factored back in until 2025.
So they're now relying on NIBRS as the sole source of data...which creates accuracy challenges as it's a system that's less than 5 years old, and 1/3 of law enforcement agencies don't report to it. NY's NIBRS reporting rate is particularly bad (2nd only to Florida's poor NIBRS reporting rate).
NYC also happens to be the same place where they claim crime is actually going down, yet the Governor just deployed National Guardsmen to the subway.
Point of reference, the left-leaning publication the Kansas Reflector brought up the very things I'm talking about to call "Shenanigans" on Ron DeSantis's claims of how much safer he made the state of Florida
Across the country, law enforcement agencies’ inability — or refusal — to send their annual crime data to the FBI has resulted in a distorted picture of the United States’ crime trends, according to a new Stateline analysis of the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting program participation data."
kansasreflector.com
So it would seem people of all factions can see "creative statistical work" for what it is when they catch the other side doing it.
As far as perceptions go, especially in NYC, there's a lot of people there who remember the much safer/cleaner time in the city from 1994-2001. For all of Rudy's present-day faults and looniness, his administration did clean up the city quite a bit. So for people in the age range where they grew up there in 90's (and don't remember how bad the 70's/80's were there)...the present day situation in NYC probably does seem like it's way worse than they remember the city being 15-20 years ago.
