U.S. Crime Rates Continue to Fall
By: Wayne Boatwright
Tags: Criminal Justice Reform, Mass Incarceration, Crime, United States, Criminal Justice

“Big data” and the intelligence revolution has advanced society’s understanding of crime risk but is often ignored by law enforcement agencies.

We Americans are terrible at estimating our risk of crime.

Will you get robbed this year? How would you rate your chances?

“Big data” and the intelligence revolution has advanced society’s understanding of crime risk but is often ignored by law enforcement agencies. Take violent crime as an example.

First, of course, crime rates do fluctuate from year to year. In 2020, for example, murder has been up but other crimes are in decline so that the crime rate, overall, is down.

“In large cities across America, murders are up sharply, while other violent crimes have decreased,” according to The New York Times.

But 2020 is different because of the COVID-19 pandemic and the protests and civil unrest after the death of George Floyd in police custody.

And the trend line for violent crime over the last 30 years has been down, not up. The Bureau of Justice Statistics found that the rate of violent crimes per 1,000 Americans age 12 and older plummeted from 80 in 1993 to just 23 in 2018. The country has gotten much, much safer, but, somehow, Americans don’t seem to feel that on a knee-jerk, emotional level.

Statistics don’t tell the whole story, and that matters when you’re trying to understand the difference between how people feel and what the data say. Not all crimes are reported to the police. “Based on the 2016 survey, less than half (44%) of violent victimizations were reported to police” according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Another reality is that crime is very localized — and estimates about the national crime rate are, well, not.

“All the homicides in Chicago occur in about 8 percent of the city’s census tracts,” said Wesley Skogan, professor emeritus of political science at Northwestern University, in a recent report.

This is all a long-winded way of saying the situation is messy, but it remains true that people’s personal fear of being victims of crimes and their perceptions of national crime rates are far from accurate.

“Regardless of what’s driving fear of crime, though, the fact that it is so out of whack with reality can make it really hard to change people’s minds or reform the criminal justice system,” said FiveThirtyEight, an affiliate of ABCNews in Many Americans Are Convinced Crime Is Rising In The U.S. They’re Wrong.

The out-of-proportion fear of crime can make it harder for reforms to gain traction, particularly if politicians with a big national platform — like Trump — are talking about “out-of-control crime” all the time, said FiveThirtyEight.

(Yes, crime is up, but from historically low levels)

Change from 2019 to 2020 Pre-COVID and Through Parts of June 2020

Chicago: 16% to 34%

Philadelphia: 11% to 23%

Oakland, CA: -41% to -8%

Los Angeles: -3% to 5%

Atlanta: -17% to 4%

Nashville: 92% to 43%

New York: -13% to 23%

New Orleans: 14% to 36%

Indianapolis: 75% to 38%

Jacksonville: -3% to 13%

Source: Police departments and media reports By The New York Times

This piece was submitted to and rejected by the San Quentin News editorial board.