Youth Crime vs. Public Opinion. Kids Commit Less Crime, but public fear remains. The youth crime data to be released next week will show more than a two-thirds decline in youth homicides arrests between 1993 and 1999. Ironically, today's youth are considerably less criminally inclined than their parents. Yet opinion surveys show that those same parents are apt to believe that their kids are more prone to delinquency than they were.
Adults think kids commit more crime than they actually do.
School crime seen on the rise, when America's schools are the safest places for kids to be. Public Perception of Crime Comes from the Media. He added, to the extent that gun crime has risen over the last three decades, this sad reality probably has more to do with gun availability than any quantifiable difference in today's youth population. The compilation of this data was funded by a grant from the Annie E. Casey Foundation.