Perceptions About Crime Are Wrong

There are some of us that are amazed that the American public, at least the ones who bothered to vote in the recent election, are so divorced from reality that they think the same political party who engineered the current recession can now fix repair the economy -- even though they still advocate the same economic policies.

But evidently politics is not the only area in which the American public has a perception that has little to do with reality.   Americans exhibit the same kind of behavior when it comes to crime.   As the chart from a recent Gallup poll shows, about 66% of all Americans believe that crime in this country is rising.   And 60% say that crime is extremely or very serious (although only 13% think crime is extremely or very serious in their own area).

The problem with this is that it simply is not true.   According to the crime statistics of the FBI, crime is actually going down in the United States (and has been for several years).   Violent crime has dropped for the last four years straight and in 2009 was 5.2% below the 2005 level (and 7.5% below the 2000 level).

The same is true about property crimes according to the FBI statistics.   It fact, property crime has shown an even larger drop.   Property crimes have dropped 11.5% since 2005 (and a huge 16.1% since the year 2000).   So why would people think crime is on the rise?

The folks at Gallup theorized that it may have something to do with the recession.   They say that people are carrying their general fear about economic conditions over to their views on crime.   I don't buy it.   If you'll notice, the percentage of people believing crime is rising has dropped a couple of points since 2007 when the recession started (although I'll admit that could be due to the margin of error).

I went back and looked at the FBI statistics for the year 2004 -- a year well before the start of the current recession.   It was also a year where both violent and property crimes were going down (and had been for a while).   Yet about 60% of Americans in 2004 believed that crime was rising.

I personally believe that television has more to do with this misconception than the recession.   Even in a year where crime is falling, television news (especially on the local level) can find plenty of crimes to broadcast.   We've all heard the phrase "If it bleeds, it leads", and that is very true of television news.   They learned a long time ago that people are more likely to watch bad news, such as crime stories, than good news stories (which most people consider to be "puff pieces" or not real news).  

Television gives people a skewed view of what is really going on in the world.   By focusing on crime and other bad news stories (in an effort to keep ratings up so they can sell more advertising), television convinces a lot of people that things are worse than they really are.

There are problems in this country, but a rising crime rate is not one of them.