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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 23, 2025

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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?

I don't know how to reconcile those insistences with the stark change in my daily life.

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.

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."

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.

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.