Comment by pton_xd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pton_xd | Hacker News Reader

I was linked an article [0] claiming that "the federal government has two ways of measuring crime, the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program. The former asks around 240,000 Americans if they’ve been the victim of a crime in the last year whereas the latter relies on crimes reported to police in a given year and shared with the bureau.

A gap has emerged between the two measures. More people are telling the Bureau of Justice Statistics that they’ve been victimized, but the FBI is reporting fewer crimes."

The article goes on to say that "the UCR reported that violent crime fell by 2% between 2021 and 2022" and yet "the NCVS found that the number of people saying they were the victims of violent crimes increased by 42.4% between 2021 and 2022, rising from 16.5 victimizations per 1000 people to 23.5 victimizations per 1000."

Does anyone have more information on the accuracy of that claim?

As a personal anecdote, my car was broken into last year and I did not bother filing a police report.

[0] https://dailycaller.com/2024/04/25/media-outlets-misrepresen...

While also anecdotal, I know of multiple cases in Seattle of serious crime not being reported in recent years because of a widespread and often valid perception that the police no longer respond to most crimes. People complained about the police pre-COVID but at least they usually showed up, eventually. Whether or not it is true, there is definitely a perception that calling the police has reliably become a waste of time in most cases for crimes they used to respond to, and people's behavior has changed to reflect that.

Same here for San Francisco

Local and state level crime reporting tracks the FBI's data though. Also the Daily Caller is (as you might expect from a partisan source) spinning the data pretty badly. Here's the actual report they linked to justify that "42.4% increase": https://bjs.ojp.gov/document/cv22.pdf

Look at the chart. It's been basically basically flat, with some noise, for the past 16-17 years. But indeed, there's a fairly big noise bump at the very last data point. (Or alternatively you could look at 2022 as a return to the mean following two years of depressed crime statistics during the pandemic?)

It's cherry-picking, basically.

I know the perception is that the police don’t care anymore. Bo surprise these are diverging and that no one trusts anything put out by the government anymore anyway

>As a personal anecdote, my car was broken into last year and I did not bother filing a police report.

"The thing I have noticed is when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. There's something wrong with the way you are measuring it". —Jeff Bezos <https://sports.yahoo.com/amazon-ceo-jeff-bezos-explains-2123...>

An interesting analysis, but do you have links to the primary sources or to a more credible source than the Daily Caller?

> As a personal anecdote, my car was broken into last year and I did not bother filing a police report.

What does that represent? Not only are you just one person, people have been behaving like that for generations, not just the last 4 years.

What would you hope to gain from a “more reliable” source when the DailyCaller article links to the sources of its claims? Do you not even bother to read something if it’s from a source you don’t frequently read?

If you carefully pick the start and end dates, you can report a 42% increase in a (noisy but) essentially flat line. See the other comment by ajross below, or go look at the chart yourself. The problem here is the interpretation of the data.

They carefully picked the most recent data available, and interpreted it correctly.

The media is reporting that the public perception is that crime is going up when it is going down, but if the victimization survey is correct, the public perception is that crime is going up when it is going up.

That doesn't mean the public perception hasn't been wrong in the past - it has - but it wasn't wrong during the period of the most recent available data, again, if the victimization survey rather than the FBI data is correct.

> Do you not even bother to read something if it’s from a source you don’t frequently read?

I don't read disinformation sources. It's a waste of time, hoping that this time, it might be different.

If someone who has misinformed me 10,000 times sends me an email with information, I don't take the time to look into it.

I've never heard of this site but the about us starts with:

> Founded in 2010 by Tucker Carlson

The homepage has a headline of "Owning the libs" and the paid members section seem to be called "Patriots".

Clearly there's some different agenda besides reporting the news. This is a low budget version of something like Breitbart and I won't bother reading the article.

Between 2021 and 2022 the rate of violent victimization reporting to police dropped from 46% to 42%. Data is not yet available for 2023:

https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/criminal-victimizat...

https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/criminal-victimizat...

The pre-pandemic, pre-George Floyd norm was around 46-47%:

https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/criminal-victimizat...

>No statistically significant change was detected in the percentages of violent crime reported to police from 2014 (46%) to 2015 (47%)

How does one have an official source of "A crime was done to me but I just decided to not call the police"

You call them. That's what the NCVS does.

At least in Seattle it's become notably more common in the past handful of years for people to not bother reporting many crimes, knowing that the police will not even show up for most of them.

This was not true 5-10 years ago.

How do you know?

It was true 30 years ago, it took most people at least 20 years to take a hint.

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