Americans' feelings on crime don't match data
By: N'dea Yancey-Bragg
USA Today
..... President Donald Trump's crackdown on crime in Washington, DC, continues a decades-long American story: a Data says crime is going down, even as many Americans feel like it's spiraling out of control.
.....
FBI data has shown ht nation;s crime rate declined over the past thee decades, but over half of Americans have said they believe their is more crime than the year before in nearly every Gallup survey since 1993.
..... "People don't keep track of these things. They don't look at statistics. ... They're just having feeling that they're not safe, said Howard Lavine, a professor of political science and psychology at the University of Minnesota.
..... Violent crime occurs everyday at rates that can vary between and within cities, which can affect the public's perception of their safety, according to Alex Piquero, a professor at the University of Miami and the former director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
..... "Are we safe today? Yeah, we're safer," Piquero said. "But we're not completely safe."
..... There are several reasons the perceptions don't match the data:
* Violence in the United States: The baseline level of violence in the United States remains higher than tis peer countries, which can fuel legitimate fear, according to Lavine.
* News and Social Media: Social media and news reports on relatively rare incidents like flash mob robberies can further fuel misconception about public safety, Piquero said. The Pew Research Center found in 2024 that Americans who frequently consume local crime news are more likely to be concerned about crime affecting them personally.
* Partisanship: The gap between Americans' perception of crime widened more than ever in 2024, with 29% of Democrats and 90% of Republicans saying they believed crime increased that year, Gallup found
* Distrust in data: Crime data is notoriously complicated, in part because of inconsistencies in how local law enforcement track crime. Drawing conclusions from the data has become political fodder.
.....
Data analyst Jeff Asher thinks the contested DC crime data likely overstates a drop in violent crime, but that's not particularity surprising to him.
..... Asher, co-founder of the data analytics firm AH Datalytics, said it's not entirely clear why the discrepancy in crime data exists, but it's not uncommon for law enforcement data to have inaccuracies, he said.
..... National crime data isn't perfect, either. The FBI's crime reports rely on information submitted by police, but the country's 18,000 law enforcement agencies aren't required to report this data and not all do, which has led to questions about accuracy.
..... Meanwhile, the Bureau of Justice Statistics produces an annual National Victimization Survey, which includes both reported and unreported crimes.
..... These reports generally mirror one another, Piquero said, but the BJS survey often shows certain crimes are consistently underreported to police, such as domestic violence, rape and hate crimes. The two sets of data, taken together, can provide a sense of how crime is changing, he said.
..... Contributing: Erin Mansfiled, Zac Anderson and Kathryn Palmer, USA today; Reuters