Crime in America keeps going down, yet the American public refuses to believe it

Edit: for example, there are 476 hits on Boston.com's news wire for the word "murder" over the past 30 days. That's more than 14/day! http://search.boston.com/local/Search.do?s.sm.query=murder&#...

Take the Lacey act: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/16/usc_sec_16_00003372----...

It is unlawful for any person to import, export, transport, sell, receive, acquire, or purchase any fish or wildlife or plant taken, possessed, transported, or sold in violation of any law, treaty, or regulation of the United States or in violation of any Indian tribal law;

Can you really say every piece of food you've ever acquired followed every required law? Did the truckdriver speed? It seems to me, you can be fined as much as the ticket would have cost the driver.

Yes, it's fiction, but it is fiction that relies on verisimilitude for effect, i.e. it isn't fantasy. It has to seem real, which undoubtedly has an effect on what people perceive as real. With a steady diet of fictional crime one could easily be persuaded that crime is more common than it is.

I wonder if paradoxically this also helps to lower the incidence of crime, as the payoff in crime fiction is usually the criminal getting caught.

TFA cheerfully ignores the role of local news media in hyping up any story of violent crime and encouraging anxiety and paranoia when it comes to crime in general.

"Are your children endangered by crazed illegal immigrant serial killer internet pedophile terrorists in their school right now? Find out, tonight at 11."

http://runningagile.files.wordpress.com/2008/02/dilbert-appr...

Systemically measuring things can have the opposite effect than what was desired.

EDIT: Fixed link

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wire_(season_3)

In a small town where everyone's extended family has lived there for 20 generations and everyone know everyone else, people are going to be more trusting, compared to a newer community where there are many, many first generation passer-bys who move there and fairly quickly (< 5 yrs) move elsewhere.

On the one hand, I'd like to think that the benefit from immigration due to a broader base of consumers might bring about enough additional prosperity to offset that decrease in trust.

But on the other hand, a necessary precursor to a functioning market is that the participants trust one another. If the effect is as this short article suggests, then maybe it does cause more damage than good, at least in the short term.

I note that the article is a bit aged; I wonder if any further research has been done.

Maybe that's actually part of it. A culture of suspicion would seem likely to make crime less likely to be successful, so perhaps worried vigilance is part of why crime is decreasing.

Edit: Underreporting might explain some of this apparent decrease, too. If you think there's essentially no hope of recovering what was lost, you might well not bother reporting a crime, and you're less likely to think that the police can be effective for you if it seems as though they're ineffective in general.

Last spring, I had my G1 stolen right out of my hands while I was texting on it, in downtown DC. I didn't even realize it was taken at first; I thought I'd dropped it because someone bumped me, so it took a few seconds to even look for the thief, and by that point he was just going around the corner. If I had reported it, I wouldn't have been able to give a description other than general skin color, build, and clothing, and 90% of the people around me were wearing the same jeans-and-red-shirt as the thief (a Capitals game night). With less than a 1% chance of getting my phone back, and no insurance on it, I didn't bother to spend the next coupla hours of my life complaining to the police about it; that would have just made things worse for me.

She's almost 90 and I finally got her to visit NY when I was passing through on my way back from Europe last year. It was near Christmas, so we went to the Rockefeller Center, saw the tree, and saw a Broadway show and she loved it all. She kept being amazed at how little crime there was, like she was expecting robberies and muggings and cars lit on fire and flipped over every other block.

When I was growing up in the '70s I used to ride my bike everywhere. Even at 10 years old I was riding clear across town, with absolutely no supervision. What parent allows their kids to do that today?

One of the places I'd ride to during the summer was a nearby river. We'd all go swimming there, jumping off the bridge and such. But who would ever go swimming in some river now, despite the fact that water pollution is far better now than it was 30-35 years ago?

Full disclosure: I was hit by cars twice while on my bike. And at the river I once dove off the rope swing head first and let go where the water was only 3-4 feet deep, so I'm darned lucky I didn't break my neck and drown. But I did survive.

I frequently hear people swearing without trying to express hate, it has just become a part of their parlance.

From the wikpedia article:

"One partial, but significant cause of high incarceration rates is that the United States locks people up, some for a long time, for non-violent crimes.

...

Within three years of being released, 67% of the ex-prisoners re-offend and 52% are actually re-incarcerated."

I wonder how many of those locked up for some definition of non-violent/minor crime, or casual drug offense, and who are part of the 67% and 52%, would never have gone on to "re" offend and be "re" incarcerated if they hadn't been imprisoned in the first place.

The main culprit is your local news.

Without additional evidence, that police officer's statement isn't very helpful or credible.

I no longer know this person. Thus, every murderer has been removed from my notice, and hence no one gets murdered anymore.

[1] http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/notorious_murders/classic...

That said, age does play a significant role in crime rates. Our population is aging, and that's probably the primary cause of the decreasing crime rate.