In a piece factchecking Donald Trump’s claims in his acceptance speech at the 2024 Republican convention, the New York Times‘ Steven Rattner (7/24/24) responded to Trump’s claim that “our crime rate is going up” by pointing out:
Crime has declined since Mr. Biden’s inauguration. The violent crime rate is now at its lowest point in more than four decades, and property crime is also at its lowest level in many decades.
The Times illustrated the point with this chart, which shows violent crime decreasing by 26% since President Joe Biden was inaugurated, and property crime going down 19%:
In a rational world, voters would be aware that crime went down sharply during the Biden/Harris administration, continuing a three-decade decline that has made the United States of 2024 far safer than the country was in 1991. To the extent that voters see national elected officials as responsible for crime rates, Biden and his vice president Kamala Harris would benefit politically from these trends.
One thing polling tells us is that leading news outlets do a poor job of informing voters about the crime situation (New York Times, 7/23/24).
But we don’t live in a rational world—so in the days after Harris became the apparent presidential nominee of the Democratic Party, she got a series of warnings from the New York Times.
“Today, many Americans are worried about crime,” David Leonhardt wrote in the Times‘ popular Morning newsletter (7/23/24). “Many voters are concerned about crime and public safety,” lawyer Nicole Allan wrote in a Times op-ed (7/23/24). “Ms. Harris, especially, will run into problems on immigration and crime,” Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson wrote in another op-ed (7/23/24).
“Ms. Harris was a constant target last week at the Republican National Convention,” Jazmine Ulloa reported in a Times news story (7/21/24). “In panels and onstage, speakers tied her to an administration that they say has led to increases in crime and inflation.”
In none of these mentions did the Times‘ writers attempt to set the record straight on the actual crime situation in the country—that crime rates are low and heading lower. In the case of the news report, such an observation would likely be seen inside the Times as editorializing—a forbidden intervention into the political process.
But most people don’t get their ideas about how much crime there is by personal observation; with roughly 1 person in 300 victimized by violent crime over the course of a year, you’d have to know an awful lot of people before you would get an accurate sense of whether crime was up or down based on asking your acquaintances.
As with immigration, and to a certain extent with the economy, people get the sense that crime is a crisis from the news outlets that they rely on. If they’re being told that “many Americans are worried about crime”—then many Americans are going to worry about crime.
Research assistance: Alefiya Presswala
ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.
Thank you Jim for reminding us of media failure to set the record straight on the decade long decrease in most types of crime rate. Conservatives have been campaigning incessantly on “increasing insecurity” despite factual evidence to the contrary and of course they are getting a free pass from corporate media. This has had a huge impact on local races out of sequence with national elections, i.e. when voter turnout is lower and socially isolated older voters make up a disproportionate fraction of the vote.
If we had a rational media people would have know that the sharp drop in crime started in the 90s and happened across the developed world. The only time I saw the media focus on that drop was when they wanted to give Rudy Giuliani credit for the drop in NYC which required ignoring the fact that that drop was happening everywhere.
People would also know about the theory that this drop coincided with the coming of age of the first generation to come of age in a long time that had not been exposed to fumes from leaded gasoline.
https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposure-gasoline-crime-increase-children-health/
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/02/an-updated-lead-crime-roundup-for-2018/
“There have always been challenges in developing a cohesive, quantifiable explanation of the lead-crime theory. Other factors also correlate with populations who are exposed to high lead amounts.
Living in poverty, lacking health care, good nutrition and educational opportunities are other factors, apart from or combined with lead exposure.
Within the U.S., the amount of lead in the air correlates with resource deprivation. This means that in areas where childhood populations are exposed to greater lead concentration, those children are also less likely to have access to resources that would help prevent, screen for, or treat lead poisoning.”
https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/what-research-says-about-the-lead-crime-hypothesis
Wow, more b&s this time from an editor!
“The uncertainty largely stems from the fact that 2021’s data was more incomplete than any in recent memory”
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2022/10/08/the-problem-with-the-fbi-s-missing-crime-data
“But the bureau switched the way it collects crime data this year, and many police departments did not get on board. Los Angeles and New York City did not report to the FBI. In fact, only 63% of the country’s police departments submitted anything, and some of the data that was submitted was incomplete.”
https://www.npr.org/2022/10/05/1127047811/the-fbis-new-crime-report-is-in-but-its-incomplete
“The end of Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) blinded us to much of what was happening in many of them,” said Dylan Purcell, data reporter at the Inquirer. “The state police recently relaunched their lookup tool but it’s got issues. The transition from UCR to NIBRS is a setback for crime reporters all around the country.”
https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2022/what-is-nibrs-new-fbi-data-explained/
“To track the numbers that police departments report, the FBI for decades used a system called the Uniform Crime Reporting Program (UCR) to collect data. But in 2021, the Bureau switched to a different system, called the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), which provides more details on crimes that are reported. Though the change is meant to improve tracking, this week’s announcement from the FBI highlights what experts say are serious concerns about its impact on crime statistics for years to come”
https://time.com/6159812/fbi-crime-stats-data/
“In 2019, 89% of agencies covering 97% of the population submitted data, but by 2021, that coverage plummeted to less than 63% of departments overseeing just 65% of the population. Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City all failed to submit crime data. To increase participation, the FBI relaxed the NIBRS requirement in 2022, allowing agencies to report via the legacy system.”
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/fairness-justice/2953562/bad-data-from-the-fbi-mislead-about-crime/
“The New York City and Los Angeles police departments are among the 40% of law enforcement agencies nationwide not sharing their 2021 crime data with the FBI.”
https://www.newsnationnow.com/us-news/cities-nationwide-not-reporting-crime-data-to-fbi/
How humans who tell fables like this sleep at night escapes me. Fare is absolutely the worst. You are deliberately misleading people, for money. What is the definition of that behavior?
different related topic thread, why people do not report crimes.
“To get another idea of what these numbers mean, in 2022, with 41.5% of violent crimes reported to the police and only 35.2% of those resulting in an arrest, that implies that only 14.6% of violent crimes result in an arrest (Figure 5). If you take the 20.3% of reported violent crimes in large cities resulting in an arrest, that implies that only 8.4% of all violent crimes resulted in an arrest. For property crimes, the numbers are even worse. With 31.8% of property crimes reported to police and only 11.9% of those reported crimes resulting in an arrest, that means that only 3.8% of all property crimes result in an arrest. For large cities with over a million people, only 1.4% of all property crimes result in an arrest.”
https://crimeresearch.org/2024/04/the-collapse-in-law-enforcement-as-arrest-rates-plummet-people-have-been-less-willing-to-report-crime/
But of course this is not just done to humans here in the US.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-51408921
OF course using junk science (or news) to report on things makes people less likely to trust you!
https://www.propublica.org/article/911-call-analysis-fbi-police-courts
In general our criminal justice system is broken. Fare does not help by telling stories that are not accurate, nor complete reporting on the issues.
https://www.propublica.org/article/911-call-analysis-fbi-police-courts
Scare tactics, especially when out of context, are good for media ratings and useful for reinforcing political divisions. Neither Ds (as represented by the NYT) or Rs (obsessed with “security”) have any reason to tell the truth about crime statistics.
Never mind both parties are neolib; they support an econ system that must keep growing and that considers devastation of human and natural resources as mere externalities. (a real term meaning these awful effects don’t count.) Never mind they’re also now both neocon since this admin’s Dept of State is run by people trained by Dick Cheney. Neocons are all about control, power, domination. De facto empire by any means believed necessary, including endless wars. That’s what we should be afraid of.
But the D tactic is to terrify us about Trump as dictator and the R threat to democracy. Never mind the Ds dumped the New Deal, abandoned labor, and purged rank and file party democracy decades ago. Lesser of two evils is still evil and offers nothing positive. It’s the scenic Potemkin route to the same destination.
The Ivy D party elite represents the 10-20% admin and professional class. An elite not affected by mass layoffs and deaths of despair. The same who considers itself a “meritocracy” while considering us working class lessers “a basket of deplorables.” The same who as well paid bureaucrats keep oligarchies, plutocracies, and actual dictatorships in business. The same who in an earlier incarnation so well characterized in David Halberstam’s book //The Best and the Brightest// produced the horrors of Vietnam because of their arrogant sense of superiority. We’re in B & B 2.0; many of us lessers can see the same disasters happening.