Most Americans are wrong about crime

But they’re right that something has changed in American cities.

In 2020 and 2021, amid a pandemic that wreaked general havoc on the social fabric of the United States, violent crime rose. Today, most Americans believe that crime in the US has come roaring back — maybe even to the levels of the 1980s and ’90s.

But a look at the data shows a very different story. Nevertheless, the feeling that our cities are less safe is at least partly coming from something real. Something has changed in American cities, particularly since the pandemic. So what’s different, and what is the truth about crime in America right now?

Chapters:
00:00 Crime up or crime down
1:27 Crime stats
3:23 Public perception
4:26 Where crime is
7:03 Cities have changed
8:40 Stats don't matter

Sources and further reading:

[bkigbfo]

Better help is a scam and anyone that promotes it is contributing

[WOODSLD]

People love making other people panic. It’s an American pastime.

[abba]

Better Help got sued for selling personal data and lost.

[chuck]

betterhelp is bad for patients and practitioners

[abacus-seven]

it's a shame to put out a video this good that no one in the comments is talking about because of the sponsor.

[xvx]

That's because they listen to the media and the media says crime is high so they can hook eyeballs to watch ads. As far as I'm concerned the media has destroyed their credibility.

[judesussman]

why on earth were those people just chanting crime in the intro?

[Artyomi]

There is a similar phenomenon when you look at the actual statistics of death versus media coverage of deaths. For example, Homicide makes up 0.9% of all causes of death and terrorism is basically almost 0%, yet the news coverage on homicide is 22% (compared to coverage on other causes) and coverage on terrorism is in the 30% (in 2017 at least). Meanwhile, heart disease makes up about 2-3% of the coverage while 30% of deaths are actually due to heart disease.

The news only reports on sensational causes such as homicide, cancer, self-harm, terrorism - but never about slow systemic killers like respiratory disease, Alzheimers, pneumonia, kidney disease, etc.. They’ll also only mention drug overdoses to say it’s a problem, not who it’s happening to and why and how to solve it.
Same goes with crime - they’ll report on the sensational homicides happening in populated areas, or talk about the poverty on the streets, but never about the actual systemic causes of the suffering that leads to crime, or the crime that happens on a daily basis to disadvantaged communities (unless they wanna demonize them).

[imdownwithjoshbrown]

didn't want to pull the sponsor on this video? Maybe you can do a video about how they're selling user health data

[kueller]

The big issue with poverty-as-crime is it looks to solutions for crime instead of solutions to poverty, and this in turn helps make the poverty worse. American homelessness in cities is very much related to increasing costs of rent, which is about city policy and housing. Drug use is largely the opioid epidemic which was a pharmaceutical malpractice and can be aided with recovery programs. Addiction combines with homelessness to become _visible_ addiction.

Solutions to crime is the police. The police can only shove people around or throw them in jail for some time. But they don't go away so the problem doesn't really go away. I don't know how to solve that so long as people conflate police/addiction and actual crime. Whenever a city tries to push for better and proper policy there is an uproar because if you only see the problems are criminal then shifting attention away from policing looks like a tolerance of crime.

[Adrian-uqyb]

I think a big factor in why Americans feel as though crime has been increasing is because of our media. When we turn on the tv, whether it’s the local news, or national news channels like CNN, Fox, CBS, MSNBC, etc. you’re more than likely gonna run into at least one story talking about someone getting killed, or robbed, or assaulted, or something else along those lines; and it’s because those stories interest people more than something along the lines of, “This zoo welcomed a new animal.” “Our city has just elected a new comptroller.” “The public library has bought a thousand new books.” I’m no different, in my city a security guard at my old high school was shot while breaking up a fight, and one of the first things I did when I heard that news was turn on the TV to hear my mayors press conference on the shooting. News channels jobs are to tell the people what is happening around them, but it’s also to get views, and talking about crime is one major way to get more people listening to you, and in turn get more money. But it also leads to a somewhat warped perception of reality, because when these for profit companies constantly talk about crime in order to get people to listen to them, it in turn leads people to believe that crime is everywhere, even if that isn’t true.

[Facetiously.Esoteric]

As with numerous other issues, a big part of the problem is news networks needing to create drama in a bid for viewers. Add social media who will say anything for money to that equation, and we end up where we are now.

[arahman]

Pausing a video about crime to promote a scam...bruh moment.

[chaosfenix]

I think that perception is also affected by how well an individual experiences crime. What I mean is that in the 90s when you saw a news story about a violent crime you would potentially see police tape or at most someone in a hospital. Now, thanks to everyone having really good cameras in their pockets and surveillance cameras being so cheap, you don't see the scene of the crime but you get to watch the crime itself. You see the gun fight or you see the person being beat with a hammer. It really changes your perception of how safe you feel. Before it was just a statistic, but with the video you see it in all of its brutality. The brutality hasn't changed but how you experience it definitely has.

Edit: Also wanted to add that just because the rate is decreasing doesn't mean it still isn't too high. Our homicide rate is much higher than most developed nations with our homicide rate of 6.4/100k being much closer to Russia's 6.8 and El Salvador's 7.8 than Canada's 2.3 or Norway's 0.6. It is better but we still have a long ways to go.

[SRMkay]

So I live in Philadelphia, and I've lived here for 3 years. Part of the issue with these surveys is that people will tend to remember a spike in crime for much longer than a period of relative safety, and they may believe that a crime spike is still ongoing much longer than it actually is. Around the pandemic, there was a fair bit of looting downtown--not uncommon to see a store with boarded windows after a break-in. After the pandemic, the "Kia Boys" challenge saw a spike in vehicle theft. Once Kia/Hyundai recalled the affected vehicles, there was a new issue with roaming gangs of teenagers entering stores en masse and shoplifting stuff, using their numbers to get away with it. All of those problems have subsided for the most part, but things like that stick in people's minds. People may delude themselves into thinking looters are still breaking into pandemic-shuttered stores in 2024, or car thieves are still targeting Kias and Hyundais despite them receiving a security update a year ago. Bad experiences tend to make a bigger impression on our minds than good ones.

[alexaramachandran]

Vox still being sponsored by betterhelp 🙄

[SuperMustache]

I'd love to see a video about why crime fell so sharply in the '90s

[micahbush]

What, you mean Americans form their opinions based on what they _think_ is true, regardless of whether it actually aligns with reality? That's a shocker.

[terrancelopez]

Lets talk about:
White-collar Crime,
Wage Theft,
Tax Crime,
PPP Loan Fraud,
Police Crime,

[petersmythe]

There are three kinds of people:
1. Those who see crime happening on the streets.
2. Those who see crime happening on the news.
3. Those who see crime happening in the numbers.

Group 2 are operating with zero, or effectively zero information. They're not multiplying the murder rate per whatever by life expectancy and calculating the expected QALY cost due to the chance of being murdered due to lifestyle change XYZ. They're not looking at what's happening in the world and reacting accordingly either. They're looking at the news and the news always says one thing "there was a murder somewhere in the country today." If murder got 30 times better or worse it would do the same thing. They are completely insensitive to *actual* changes in crime rate, only to what an opinion-based partisan media ecosystem SAYS the crime rate is doing. This is the vast majority of Americans who take neither a data driven nor direct experience approach but rather one that is based on anecdote and feelings rather than anything else.