Are we experiencing an increase in crime or are we simply perceiving an increase because of more democratized and decentralized information sharing?

Food for thought.

I live in an inner city residential neighborhood. We have homes on quarter acre lots but we are only fifteen minutes from downtown. It is a big city with 400,000 in the municipality and 6 million in the SMSA. The municipality is 55% black and 45% white and other. The SMSA is 65% white and 35% black and other.

Over the past couple of decades, during the blessed overall decline in crime at the national, regional and city level, we as a neighborhood enjoyed increasing security as well. Every couple of years or so there might be a rash of car thefts or break ins or someone stealing mail, but overall the trend was beneficial.

It is a reasonably engaged community. Most streets have some sort of Listserv for two or three or four streets, by which information can be quickly shared. Neighborhood party, information about a bond referendum, who to call when the garbage hasn't been picked up, who can recommend a good electrician - that sort of thing. Those listservs have been around for ten or fifteen years.

Then, some eighteen months ago we started to experience a distinct increase in burglaries of homes and cars all across the community. People increased their vigilance, installed better lighting, mounted security cameras, improved their window and door security, etc. The listserv's bumped up. There were community meetings. Security block captains were organized. More information was being shared about the latest intrusion. It was organic democracy in action.

In the middle of all this, someone introduces everyone to NextDoor App, a smart phone application that allows people in a vicinity to communicate with one another. A much enhanced listserv as it were. You can set your parameters very narrowly (just these few blocks), broader (this entire community), broader yet (adjacent communities), etc.. You can get emergency notifications sent directly to your email and to your smartphone.

NextDoor quickly takes off with several hundred in the neighborhood signing up. Information is now relayed faster and more accurately. "Someone is soliciting at the top of Main Street and headed south. They do not have a City issued solicitor's permit. I called 911." "Golden retriever seen running loose down Smith Street towards McKinley Street." The listservs generated a handful of comments in a week about a narrow range of issues. NextDoor generates 30-50 a day on a broad range of things. It is a great supplement to the neighborhood from a security perspective.

The police are always stretched thin. They encourage everyone to call 911 for even the most modest of suspicions. Their dispatching system prioritizes calls based on the immediacy of likely danger. Crimes in progress with weapons take top priority. Reports of property crimes that occurred last night, take bottom priority. Usually the police are able to cover the most active issues. Coverage of the more minor issues is hit-and-miss. Sometimes all you get is a request to file a report.

Since we are a relatively quiet part of the city, we get less police attention. Given that most reports are for property crimes that have already occurred (example: "my car was rifled last night and some CDs taken"), we get advice from the police but relatively little presence.

People are feeling preyed upon. The longer it continues the more people are on edge. The more they feel dissociated from the municipal political system. "We pay virtually all the city taxes and yet we don't get any protection."

I have been interested in this process of community engagement through technology enablement for a couple of reasons. This is a neighborhood of professionals with families. Everyone is always busy. Getting together is hard. Most people don't know more than their immediate neighbors. Would NextDoor increase the sense of community? Would more people connect with one another owing to NextDoor? I think the answer is turning out to be yes.

A second reason for my interest is related to the question of what happens in a complex, technologically enabled society when traditional media platforms no longer survive? Our hometown papers consolidated into a single monopolistic paper three or four decades ago. The local TV news reports are little more than fluff pieces and police blotter reporting. The financial condition of both is shaky. If we lose the traditional platforms, what replaces them? How does society process information? What are the implications if different groups access information at different rates, at varying degrees of breadth, and process it diversely? If we aren't all watching Walter Cronkite and trusting his version, what is the shared epistemological world view?

We are well down that path. The news media has lost virtually all trust among readers and viewers. We are well into this dystopian epistemological reality. The engaged and successful consume immense amounts of information and process it according to their own lights while others consume virtually no information and what they consume is predigested by increasingly marginal and extreme interest groups.

That is concerning. I am no advocate of one source of information that everyone listens to. Indeed, being reasonably libertarian, I look at the changes as liberating. There are more voices speaking more opinions. In the long run, I think this will all work out well.

In the near term, though, it is hard to let go of the familiar. I have read the New York Times for decades, I routinely listen to NPR. I know they represent highly biased viewpoints. I know they are not self-sustaining financially and therefore doomed to fail without adjustments. And yet, were I to wake up tomorrow without there being a New York Times at the door-step or NPR on the airwaves, I would regret that outcome.

This sense of unease is exacerbated by not being able to visualize what comes next. People want information. It has value. Where there is value and demand, there is commerce. What will the vehicle look like in the future. I can construct any number of increasingly variant scenarios but I simply have no real idea. I can see some experimentation already but it is not indicative yet. Is NextDoor app and its kin perhaps some foreshadowing of how communities might aggregate and disseminate information in the future?

The third reason for my interest was with regard to how NextDoor affects perception. A few months after the break-ins began, and after everyone began using NextDoor, a couple of burglars were arrested. Yay! But reports of car break-ins, carjackings, armed robberies kept coming in.

However, for some months now, I have had the nagging question in my mind, "Has crime really risen or do we just perceive it as rising because we are now more connected and communicating more locally?" My neighbors are increasingly on-edge. There is palpable concern. It is already translating into political action and changes in local behavior. In a deeply liberal community, more and more people are announcing their armed status.

But the first step to good solutions is good knowledge of the problem. And the first step to defining the problem is to ask "Is it real?" Has crime really risen or are we simply more aware of the crime that was always there?

Once you know the right questions to ask, sometimes you simply have to wait for the information to fall into your lap. And indeed, yesterday our block captain sent out the weekly crime report. She attached to it the monthly report for the neighborhood just to the south of us. They are closer to the transitional parts of town and have always been more exposed to crime (about 40% higher crime rate). They have also been better organized as a community with a more robust community security group.

In their monthly report, they included data and trend graphs for all the basic crimes (murder, rape, assault, burglary, robbery, etc.) going back four years for their neighborhood. For them, crime has not increased. There is noise in the system with quarterly swings up and down of 20%, but the trend line is basically flat on all categories of crime.

Their crime trends might be different from ours but I suspect not. With only that as evidence, it suggests that crime is flat and that the perception of increased crime is a function of improved communication within a community facilitated by such apps as NextDoor.

I find that fascinating and pregnant with implications, some good and some challenging. We live in interesting times.