What does it have to do with an opinion poll like this though?
In this case, "Any item stolen from you?" seems to include having an Amazon package stolen off your porch, which happens widely (including to me) here in suburban upstate NY too.
This level of crime used to be something we'd attribute to failed communities and not acceptable for civilized people (those living in cities)
Or as my mom told me, two wrongs do not make a right
Edit to add: this example just happened to be on my mind recently. I intended it as an evocative example of priority setting, not as a thorough proof or something. But there is plenty of other evidence that crime reporting is carried out according to a propagandist program. For example, media critics have carefully surveyed how routine crime statistics are reported, and found that the ones that get headlines are often extremely cherry-picked and reported on out of context. Like "murders in neighborhood x increased 20% this year" is often the headline when murders overall in the area are going down, other crime is down even in that neighborhood, and the 20% is based on a baseline of like 10 murders anyway, so the 20% increase is well within the noise. And of course, they leave out the comparison to ten or thirty years ago, when the rate was substantially higher. Crime reporting is like that year after year, no matter what is happening to crime rates overall. Not to mention that "so and so thinks briefly about reducing police budget" is considered newsworthy -- even when those budget reductions rarely come into effect -- while the norm of police budgets that balloon year after year and are overspent year after year is rarely mentioned.
Sure, but you can learn a lot about a society based on which of the two wrongs they care about.
It’s a bizzare criticism given that the usual approach to determining how much crime has happened is to ask the police department.
Most of the folks in my very low crime neighborhood have still lost a package once every few years. Are we technically crime victims? Sure. Is our area dangerous? lol, no.
Which is exactly what the survey results said.
What's the misleading part.
It didn't say muggings or break-ins it said theft.
It also didn't ask if people felt their neighborhood was dangerous. That's a different type of question that also isn't necessarily a crime statistic.
For example, do you think it's dangerous if there's a deranged person outside your home with a knife claiming he's going to knife the next infant he sees? According to crime statistics that's completely irrelevant to the neighborhood's safety.
Different numbers measure different things.
It's just such an odd specific criticism to call a survey copaganda, when it appears to be one of the very very few crime related metrics I have read that is NOT collected and communicated by cops.