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Comment by eclipticplane | Hacker News Reader

There is massive under-reporting of violent crime across many decades. How can we evaluate that?

Just in my household alone, we've been victim of 4 assault+ attacks in the past 5 years. Two resulted in arrests, zero resulted in charges.

Is that normalized in data from 20 years ago?

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>There is massive under-reporting of violent crime across many decades. How can we evaluate that?

If you don't know how to evaluate that how can you claim there's a massive under reporting of violent crime?

The last crime I was the victim of was having my car broken into around 2003. I didn't report it but I was angry. Something bad happened to me through no fault of my own and nothing I could have done reasonably would have prevented it.

There are emotions involved and I'm sure for a while I felt as though crime was everywhere and I would be the victim again.

I've had my car broken into 6 times (reported 3), my car itself stolen once, 5 bikes stolen (reported 3).

> Something bad happened to me through no fault of my own and nothing I could have done reasonably would have prevented it.

It shouldn't happen period. Effectively, at least in the USA, we've given up on this kind of crime and just expect it. Most people take the POV it is their fault (they left something visible in the car). That's BS. You are not responsible for the thief's actions. The thief is. Period!

There are places in the world where this mostly doesn't happen at all. (Japan, Singapore). You should be able to leave stuff in your car and not have it be stolen.

We, as a society, have given up on even trying to enforce this in any way shape or form AFAICT. My belief is, most of this type of crime is by just a few people repeating the same crime. Honeypots would catch those and lower the numbers by 90-95% IMO.

Honeypots would only work if the criminals are sentenced to long prison terms which is costly.

I asked chatgpt about why low level crime is low in Japan and it gave three interesting reasons.

1. Collective culture - basically focusing the harmony of society over the self. Not doing things that would harm others.

2. Fear of shame by others if caught

3. Communities are against anti social behavior

Assume these are correct for low levels crimes. Does this sound like America? We are a country where the freedom to be an asshole has high value. Individualism and personal freedom are over community.

Think about loud cars, it provides personal pleasure at the expense of others.

I also think about how much HOAs are hated (though some support them obviously because they exist*).

There's also a movement against empathy, another reason you might not want to cause harm to others.

There is enough reason to believe that police departments do not record crime appropriately. Goodhart's law applies everywhere. If you are tasked with lowering a particular crime in your area, the fastest way to do it is to under-report it. Here is a podcast where a former NYPD officer alleges as such: https://pca.st/jSka

Of course, it applies both ways. We should not trust the reports of violent crime going up in the late pandemic era. The politics of "Defund the Police" suggests that this was a deliberate tactic.

I’m sorry your family have been a victims of violent crime. I’ve never been a victim of a violent crime, though I did have my car broken into over 20 years ago.

My anecdote would suggest there’s no crime, but we know that’s not true and why we have statistics.

You're not listening to what he is claiming, which is that crimes are going underreported and so the statistics are not accurate.

The claim is anecdotal and thus insufficient for statistical analysis, as expressed by the previous response. What did they miss exactly?

The claim that statistics are flawed is not something you can respond to with by saying that the statistics say otherwise.

But the claim specifically, was that the statistics are flawed NOW with an implication that they were not flawed before.

Not sure you can do much with that in a discussion/argument when there is no proof of that provided other than a personal anecdote.

Edit: Actually maybe I misread it, they are saying its always been flawed. But still the general point of the thread still holds I think.

People always claim statistics are inaccurate when the statistics contradict their subjective experience or sincerely held belief.

One proxy for crime statistics is homicide. Any other stat can be juked, but homicide cannot because bodies stink. To someone who was insisting to me that the UK crime rate has increased over time, I pointed out that it was possible, but unlikely. Homicide is at a multi decade low in absolute numbers, and much lower in per capita numbers. That’s likely to be correlated with violent crime.

So in the case of the UK both homicide and violent crime have followed a gentle downwards trend line, and we can trust the first line completely. Therefore, the second is likely to be true.

Did it convince the guy I explained this to? No it did not. “You don’t live in a rough area like I do”. Ok then.

Crime is often hyper localized. In some areas of some cities, crime may be going up while the overall rate of the city or country is going down. These intensive areas can also change over time. I am not aware of any analysis of the localization of crime and how it changes over time. There are a lot of choices to be made in doing that analysis, but if a reasonable local analysis across a country did that and found that in all localities crime went down, then that would seem reasonable to dismiss that guy's actual experience. The localization should probably on the neighborhood level, maybe on the order of 1000 people instead of 10000 or more.

But the overall crime rate is lower no? Less people experience or are affected by crime if the average goes down.

Which is why I didn’t deny his subjective experience. I only disagreed with him extrapolating his local experience to the whole country. His area might have become rougher, but the UK as a whole is seeing less crime.

While it's a tragedy that's happened to you the FBI posts yearly crime statistics. The numbers are verifiably true. Violent crime is at it's lowest point in decades. Even war zones like Memphis are on downtrend (though still terrible relative to other places in the US). The news absolutely lies to keep people afraid because fear sells.

Think about how afraid people were of kidnappings in the 90s, or drugs in halloween candy, etc. All overplayed, and in the case of halloween candy, a complete fabrication.

It's gotten much worse with social media. Whereas you'd normally only get your hit of "the world is on fire" once or twice a day at your favorite news station now you can get it 24/7/365.

Yeah I think it would be good to cross-check all government statistics against polls from groups such as Gallup, to get a sense of what's being reported.

Since statistics are gathered by cities and aggregated at the state then federal level it protects against a small number of bad actors from manipulating the data.

Finally the same reasons that cause underreporting today existed in the past.

1. Not reporting low level crimes feeling as it has no point.

2. Criminals not reporting when they are the victims of a crime out of fear.

3. When the victim takes the matter of into their own hands

I'll even suggest that due to racism and lack of accountability in the past it's possible more criminal complaints were ignored compared to today.

Got you covered!

They use FBI data for reported crimes as well as BJS data which interviews people and ask them if they have been the victim of a crime.

It's probably worth taking a minute or two to read their short explanation as I think it is not what people are assuming.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45588459

  > Just in my household alone, we've been victim of 4 assault+ attacks in the past 5 years. Two resulted in arrests, zero resulted in charges.

First, I'm sorry that that has happened to you. Personally I feel that that is unacceptable. You have every right to be upset and I'm personally not a fan of the police. No doubt they have a tough job, but they actually do need to do their jobs and actually focus on more impactful crimes. But that is orthogonal to this discussion.

Second, you have reported those, so they have been recorded and accounted for in this data.

If you click a few of the links on the Pew site you'll land here[0]

  | The FBI publishes annual data[1] on crimes that have been reported to law enforcement, but not crimes that haven’t been reported.

And in the next paragraph

  | BJS, for its part, tracks crime by fielding a large annual survey of Americans ages 12 and older[2] and asking them whether they were the victim of certain types of crime in the past six months. One advantage of this approach is that it captures both reported and unreported crimes.

So they are comparing two different sources which measure in two different ways. They are quite clear that this data isn't perfect, but at the end of the day, how can it be? We have to do the best with what we have available, right? But I would say that using both of these shows that due diligence is being done.

[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/24/what-the-...

[1] https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/explorer/crim...

[2] https://bjs.ojp.gov/data-collection/ncvs

[Side note]: In [0] you will also notice that they mention that the FBI changed the definition of rape in 2013. The former definition was limited to women, specifically vaginal penetration, and "forcible". In 2013 this expanded to include vaginal and anal, remove sex, and removes "forcible". Also to note that the MeToo movement started in 2006 and gained full attention in 2017. There's a commonly held belief that the rate of reporting substantially increased due to the change of definition and the greater public attention given to the subject. Believe that or not, but this is context needed to evaluate that data.

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