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Do perceived crime rates really change that quick on average though?
Perceived crime rates change much faster than actual crime rates.
I bet 'perceived crime rates' includes observations of crime-adjacent activities that wouldn't ever be measured in 'actual' rates: the appearance of ubiquitous graffiti (see pictures of 80s subway cars), or of loitering ne'er-do-wells in the park isn't necessarily a wrong perception about crime rates.
You don't have to fully endorse the broken windows theory of (causing) crime to accept that frequent observations of broken windows can cause a true perception of rising crime rates.
Along similar lines to what @WhiningCoil and @TIRM have said i think context and distribution also matter a great deal. As an example, I live in a mid-size American city that has a significantly above average crime rate on paper, but said crime is largely restricted to certain nieghborhoods and classes of people (IE Shitbirds). Respectable citizens know that nothing good happens north of a certain avenue after sundown, while the city PD maintains a visible presence in public spaces and transit (which discourages pan-handlers and loitering ner-do-wells) and actively persues property crimes. As a result the day to day perception and experience of most residents and visitors is mostly that of clean and safe '1' streets despite the ostensibly high rate of criminality.
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I'll bet the crime rates in my local major city are really quite low. Open drug selling and use is not prosecuted. Homeless shantytowns are allowed. Car break ins and retail theft are common but cops don't care. It's not even the cops' fault. Prosecutors won't prosecute so there would be no point in pursuing such criminals.
Indeed, if they decline to arrest and prosecute such criminals, then (convicted) crime rates must be low. My perception of property crime rates is rather higher since I see broken car glass on the sidewalk and many locked up items in stores. I bought a jacket and they were all locked together on cable locks. The employee explained that an organized theft gang rushed in and stole large numbers of coats, so now everything is cable locked. Grocery stores now have locked sections for not very expensive product. Who is stealing detergent? Anyways, I bet a review of local conviction rates would not reveal any of this.
Lots of people, actually.
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Crime rates aren't based on conviction rates, though I broadly agree with your post as at certain point no one even reports some of this stuff.
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A while (a decade or more, now) back, there were a series of articles about Tide being used as street currency for drug sales. I'm uncertain if that is still true, or even was ever particularly common, but it probably is at least known to store managers.
https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/01/14/why-would-drug-dealers-use-tide-as-a-currency
Any good explanation of how they were converting it to USD?
They sell it to ghetto stores, who sell it to ghetto dwellers, probably using SNAP, unlawfully.
Yes, my understanding is that detergent a) never goes bad, and b) everyone needs. It's a very safe sale to make.
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I would bet on that being true, but not a complete explanation. I'd add:
A) Crime statistics don't capture all crime. A lot of stuff is never reported. Property crimes so minor that they don't merit the time because you know the cops won't do anything about it, like stuff stolen off your front porch or out of the back of a pickup truck. Scuffles that don't result in major injury. Things that happen to shitbirds while they are engaged in shitbird activities and would prefer not to involve the law. Sexual harassment or assault under gray circumstances. People observe or hear about those even if they aren't reported to police and it figures into their perceptions.
A1) Attempted crimes that don't rise to the level of being worth reporting or prosecuting. I see a guy hanging around my truck in the parking lot and yell hey can I help you and he runs off. The guy that follows my wife for a block or two so she goes into a store and he disappears. Those don't show up in statistics. This largely overlaps with what you are saying.
B) A lot of people are wildly paranoid, and will over-react to news reports of crimes. People will tell me that in a local small city "Two or three people get killed there every weekend;" if I look at the statistics 13 people were killed there in 2021, 9 in 2022, 17 in 2023, 4 in 2024. But that's enough that they can remember a story about a person getting shot, and it makes them start to worry about going downtown.
C) People who are victims of crime talk about it a lot, and typically write over anything they did to "deserve" it.
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Small changes in daily lived experiences can have an outsized impact. The crime rate can hardly budge on paper, but things that might poll as "crime" can increase exponentially in your daily life. Where I used to live was fine on paper. I lived there for about 15 years. Then things started getting really weird. Some things would show up on paper as "crime". Gas station on the corner kept getting robbed repeatedly. There was a shooting and a shooter on the loose in my townhouse parking lot after we had our first child. Women were getting dragged off the trails and raped in attacks so lurid and on the nose you'd think they were made up had there not been so much physical evidence and they caught the guy. Turns out sometimes, just sometimes, rapist do wait in the bushes to ambush women jogging on a trail in broad daylight. Same trail we'd walk our infant daughter on in her stroller.
There were plenty of non-"crime" stuff that just added to the overall ambiance of chaos. People suddenly started stopping me in my car on the street and screaming at me for money. There were more loitering gangs of kids smoking and shouting obscenities at my wife as we walked by. Often on the playgrounds we'd go to take our daughter to... and then think better of it. More stores started locking things up. But if you complained about it, some shithead was always there to remind you "Town USA's crime rate is actually below average per capita! And year and year crime has barely budged!" I don't know how to reconcile those insistences with the stark change in my daily life.
So I left. And in the last 5 years I haven't caught a wif of a crime or "crime" anywhere in my proximity. No stores I shop at have gotten robbed, I haven't driven by a house with a squad of police cars trying to disarm a hostage situation (I forgot to mention that one in my old locale). There are no strong "civilization is at the edge of chaos" vibes like I used to get on a daily basis, per capita be damned.
Thanks for the detailed description. I assume these matters are relative in nature. Take the gas station on the corner, for example. Had it never been robbed before, as far as you can tell? Or yes, but only on occasions so rare that the whole neighborhood remembered afterwards for a long time? What about shootings and jogging women getting ambushed by rapists on the trails? Was it unheard of back in the days? And the loiterers and loud beggars?
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Lack of prosecution artificially reduce crime stats. "Crime rates are down, actually" -> our local progressive prosecutor has declined to do their job, so unprosecuted crimes are now much more common.
Unprosecuted crimes are usually still counted in statistics AIUI (specifically as "unsolved"). However, the more indirect route of "progressive prosecutors decline to do their job -> reporting crime now doesn't result in the crime stopping -> people stop bothering to report it" seems to hold water.
If you want to find most accurate crime statistics, look at crimes people have to report for insurance purposes, and this means crimes against cars.
If someone robs you on the street or burglarizes your house, you can just let it slide. If your car is gone, not so.
Far more accurate metric than murder - many people would not be missed by anyone if they went missing. Very few cars.
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Bezos' Addendum to Goodhart's Law: If your anecdotal evidence flies in the face of your data, you are probably measuring the data wrong.
The cynical version of this is "If your anecdotal evidence flies in the face of their data, they are probably measuring the data wrong."
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A sort of opposite example has been the homicide and violent crime rate in Finland up to the late 2000s or so. It used to be quite high officially. The country was also very safe in practise, at least as long as you weren’t a middle aged jobless alcoholic and didn’t start arguments at the hot dog stand queue after bars closed. There used to be a common joke that a typical Finnish murder was an alcoholic drinking at the cottage with his best buddy, getting into an argument, stabbing them with a knife and then calling the cops himself the next morning with no recollection of what happened.
Alas, then immigration and gangs happened and things aren’t as rosy anymore.
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