• usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.ml
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    1 month ago

    Wish we actually covered crime better in the news. The public perception of crime rates has been out of sync with actual crime rates for decades, largely due to how crime is portrayed in the media

    https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2016/11/16/voters-perceptions-of-crime-continue-to-conflict-with-reality/

    Or another interesting thing is how people are more likely to think that crime is up in the US overall, but not as much when they look at where they live

    https://news.gallup.com/poll/323996/perceptions-increased-crime-highest-1993.aspx

    • Keeponstalin@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      It makes no sense for Democrats to capitulate to Right Wing Framing on immigration, the idea that immigrants are bringing in crime and drugs are straight up lies. I don’t know why they are, the Pro-immigration messaging in 2016 was popular too

    • Mayor Poopington@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      People love clicking on crime articles and the news organizations are well aware of that. I noticed my mood changed a bit since leaving reddit, my local regional sub must have been half crime posts.

    • Asafum@feddit.nl
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      1 month ago

      Ha! Got ya liberal!

      Your fancy chart just shows its bias! “Violent crimes per 1000 people ages 12 and older!

      They just soooo happened to keep the most violent ones out of the data! 5-8 year olds! Propaganda and lies!

      :P

    • CharlesDarwin@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      I was checking out Kurzweil’s latest book and he made a decent point about how good news tends to get overlooked. For specific examples, he was talking about how not only is violent crime trending down, so has property crime.

    • ryathal@sh.itjust.works
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      1 month ago

      There’s a few factors. The news reports more events from further away, so there’s always crime to report on. Stats mostly focus on violent crime, someone breaking the window of every car on a street isn’t violent crime. Smaller property crimes only get reported if the police know about them, less people are contacting the police because they won’t respond anyway. Drug use leaves a bigger impression than the actual crime, it doesn’t take many people to litter an area with needles or other paraphernalia.

      People also remember negative events more, you remember replacing your catalytic converter a lot more than all the days you didn’t have to replace it

    • Match!!@pawb.social
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      1 month ago

      violent crime did actually go up in the pandemic so this is a lil out of date

      • nublug@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        1 month ago

        no, it did not. the initial lockdown at the beginning lowered violent crime a great deal, and the rate rose back up after lockdowns were lifted, but still not to the rate from before the pandemic. this isn’t out of date; you’re remembering media reports and propagandists online intentionally misrepresenting this data by only looking at during lockdown and just after, pretending lockdowns and mask mandates and other covid response measures as causing crime.

          • Keeponstalin@lemmy.world
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            1 month ago

            This article has a lot of insight. One thing that stood out what that the methodology changed in 2021 and was retroactively applied to the 2020 data.

            Quotes

            In early October 2022, the FBI released its long-awaited compilation of 2021 crime data. But this data differed sharply in content and quality from previous years due to a transition in the way the government collects crime data. Specifically, 2021 was the first year to rely exclusively on a recently updated system for tracking crime data, the National Incident-Based Reporting System. Many agencies were not able to transition to the new format in time. As a result, the bureau received full-year reports from agencies covering just half of the country’s population. By comparison, earlier reports included a full year of data from agencies covering roughly 95 percent of the population.

            To fill these gaps, the FBI’s report on national crime trends relied heavily on estimates. The agency estimated crime trends for 2021 based on the data it had available. Then it went back to 2020 and applied that same estimating methodology as if that year’s data had been similarly incomplete. In doing so, the bureau aimed to create an appropriate “apples to apples” comparison, despite the differences in data quality. The FBI also used upper- and lower-bound estimates given the uncertainty about the agency’s conclusions, estimates we represent as a rough margin of error.