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What’s new about these incentives? Why would this be happening now, uniquely?

Things like theft under $950 being classified as a misdemeanor in California (happened in 2021 IIRC), which makes it far less likely the cops will do anything about it, de-facto legalizing theft.

This isn't the only place it's happened, it's just the one that got the most visibility.

That happened in 2014. So recent-ish, but people started being really loud about it in 2021 as part of the same non-data-backed outrage.

It is a knock on effect. As decency decays and criminals figure out what the new rules are it gets amplified.

It describes a process in which crime reporting progressively gets further from the ground truth over time. This isn't new.

All of those incentives were in play 50 years ago. You may as well say you just don't like statistics that you disagree with.

As discussed in the bullet points, those incentives create a sort of natural selection which changes how the statistics are reported over time.

It's not like we are measuring length or temperature. The data has a degree of human subjectivity when being recorded. It seems normal for that subjectivity to shift over time, especially when we are taking about different humans over timespans of decades.

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