The Number of Murders Kept Falling This Year, But Fear of Crime Persists

Fear is driven by the news motto: If it bleeds, it leads

So in newsrooms across the planet this is how news is prioritised. Once we stop clickbait from being financially rewarding, this should pass.

Mind you, many people slow down to rubber neck a car crash, so we have a way to go.

Well, theft can feel very violating and breaking, even if it's not a theft that was violently done. Property crime like your house getting spray painted up with slogans you already personally agree with is violating and frustrating, too.

As far back as The Big Lebowski we, as a society, were cracking jokes about how useless cops were. When The Dude asks the officer who is helping him with his car if they have any leads on who stole and wrecked it, and the cop literally just starts laughing in his face and making fun of him.

I wonder if that's where the disconnect lies, because women don't feel protected by their abusers through restraining orders, and victims of theft don't even have cops willing to make the bare minimum effort to look for their lost items. While the worst types of crime may not be increasing, the overall social coehesion continues to drop because people do not feel protected by those systems that only look to remediate after terrible things have already happened.

Whether crime is actually rising, regular people feeling like they are not protected by the systems in place means they fear those things nonetheless, because there is very little to prevent such events from happening. This also applies to mass violent crime like mass shootings. Perhaps the violence is going down, but that doesn't make people feel any less fearful about how random it is to where you could be at school or going to a movie and suddenly be fighting for your life. Our police only deal in after-the-fact, they don't prevent violence, and as we saw with Uvalde they often stand around with their thumbs up their asses to protect themselves.

Anyway, my two cents. When people feel like their lives can be turned upside down by crime because they can't trust the police (up to and including thinking police are criminals themselves) they can't really feel safe, secure, and like they can just turn off their defenses.

This goes double for those of us who see a two-tier justice system and are very fearful of how Trump is going to weaponize the DOJ against people he doesn't like politically, even no-names like us. The fact that I have to fear my own government's crimes against me as well as regular crime? Like, who is coming to save me? Fucking nobody.

Propaganda works.

Thank you, Fox news!

This is on average, not in every jurisdiction. Here in Seattle, for example, homicides are up. The average dropping is largely based on high-crime cities seeing improvements--not necessarily the country overall.

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/law-justice/homicides-in-seattle-still-far-higher-than-before-the-pandemic-report-says/

The report is based on crimes reported to police in 36 cities, though only 29 of them provided data on homicides committed in their jurisdictions.

Based on those 29 cities, the report says homicides dipped 13% in the first half of 2024 compared to the first six months of 2023 and was 2% lower than the same period in 2019, the year before the pandemic began.

Those declines, however, were largely driven by big drops in “high homicide” cities like St. Louis, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C. and Atlanta, said Ernesto Lopez, a CCJ senior research analyst and co-author of “Crime Trends in the U.S.: Mid-Year 2024 Update.”

Homicides in Baltimore, for example, were 40% lower in the first six months of the year compared to the first half of 2019, while homicides in St. Louis and Philadelphia were down 23% and 19%, respectively, Lopez said. But he said two-thirds of cities in the report’s sample are still experiencing elevated homicide rates, including Seattle, which had 50% more homicides in the first half of 2024 versus the same period in 2019.

A) crime reporting is hit or miss, mostly miss. We really expect the people that can't tell the difference between a cell phone and a gun to tell the difference between murder, suicide, or just missing?

B) this is very much like saying "the economy is doing great" to people struggling to pay bills. Their reality is different from the stats.

Now either there is a problem with how we compile stats, or the majority of people are just living in a fantasy world. In either case pointing to the stats does nothing whatsoever, except make people distrust authority.