A reasonable hypothesis butchered by ideological blinkers and misunderstood/misrepresented data

From Many Americans Are Convinced Crime Is Rising In The U.S. They’re Wrong. But their fear makes everyone less safe. by Maggie Koerth and Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux.

Very much a dog's breakfast of proto-intellectuals. They have some of their facts right but they get a lot wrong, particularly of a definitional and contextual nature. And they are demonstrably blind to some of their own evidence which they present, affirm, and then dismiss.

In many ways this feels like a political battlefield preparation article rather than a factual discussion. Koerth and Thomson-DeVeaux seem afraid that Trump will run on a law and order platform (probably true) and that he will be persuasive with that argument (also probably true.) But they then work very hard to both prove that Americans are ignorant about crime AND aren't stupid but also are ignorant about crime.

Did I say a dog's breakfast?

At its heart, Koerth and Thomson-Deveaux and are all tangled up in definitions. My first thought was "Ben Rhodes journalists":

The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.

Pretty close for Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux - 30 years old, AB from Princeton in Religion/Religious Studies, Gender & Sexuality Studies. It may be an unfair assumption, but I am guessing she has a less empirical and mathematical grounding than were she a BS of Electrical Engineering. The Ben Rhodes jibe is less pertinent for Maggie Koerth with a sixteen career in popular science writing. Still not a strong confidence in rigorous statistics or analytical thinking.

Notoriously, journalists do not write their headlines so they can't be faulted for those. In this case, however, the main headline at least, is perhaps the most clearly true fact in the article.

Many Americans Are Convinced Crime Is Rising In The U.S. They’re Wrong.

This is true for many things. In sociology, crime research, policing, urban planning, and many other fields, it has been well established for some twenty years that national crime rates are generally falling, with some occasional temporal or locational variations, and are much lower than most people think. The editor worked in the weasel formulation "Many Americans . . . ". Well, yes. We are a wonderfully diverse, free and idiosyncratic nation. Many Americans believe many things that are outlandish. Such as the coherence of Social Justice and Critical Theory as a framework for achieving improved outcomes.

More practically, we have to deal with the Lizardman's Constant where you can find some fringe belief that is sincerely held or is mischievously advanced by survey respondents who merely want to mess with the pollsters.

Four percent of Americans believe lizardmen are running the Earth

Making the claim "Many X believe Y is rising/falling" is pretty unconvincing. What percent of Americans believe crime is rising when it is actually falling? The data is in their article. "64% of Americans believe Crime is Rising when it is Actually Falling." They have a good basis for their claim. At the start.

Their subheading is empirically much less auspicious. In fact, almost unprovable.

But their fear makes everyone less safe.

If I misestimate the measured level of crime and whether it is rising or falling, that makes everyone less safe? I follow crime studies with some level of interest but no great diligence. I have seen no studies to support that make the argument that believing crime is rising when it is actually falling makes people less safe. In fact, it is kind of challenging to put together a coherent and logical argument as to what the casual mechanisms for that outcome might even be. They make a very strong fact claim which is demonstrably true and then join it with an opinion which is virtually unsupported in the research.

That's just the issues with the headline. It is kind of downhill and inside baseball from there.

They acknowledge that crime statistics are weak.

They acknowledge that different people deal with different categories of crime and that sometimes the trend lines in different categories differ. Property crime for the nation generally continued its decline across all the nation after Ferguson in 2014 (the event which led many cities to de-police at least temporarily). But violent crimes for the nation reversed themselves for three years before reverting to the long term decline trend. And when they did rise, the rise was concentrated in select areas, primarily driven by large increases in key urban centers.

They acknowledge that the media, in their desperate pursuit of clicks do way over-emphasize crime over most other news. What they do not mention is that most of the largest media organizations are in a handful of unrepresentative cities such as New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, DC., etc which are also the most prone to fostering high crime. If the mainstream media reports what they see and experience, they are going to way overemphasize the prevalence of crime because of where they are located.

They acknowledge that definitions are fuzzy and non-standard and yet do not follow through on just how much weak data debilitates strong conclusions.

They acknowledge that many people's experience of crime doesn't even rise to the level of crime. Off-leash dog attacks in your local park increase 100% after a new entrance is created. That's the level of crime you experience. Is national crime rising? It is a hop and a skip to slip from rising ordinance infractions to rising crime.

While they acknowledge these items, they then ignore them.

What they don't acknowledge are some of the perfectly innocuous reasons why people might form a view of increasing crime when there is a national decline.

This would include:

Under different circumstances people focus on different forms of crime. In my neighborhood predation from thieves, particularly car thieves and larceny from cars has risen dramatically in the past decade compared to the US at large. If someone in this neighborhood were to answer a question about "national" crime there is going to be a discordance between what they see and experience (local property crime increase versus global all crime decrease). You can certainly see how that would skew survey results.

City dwellers, who might by disproportionately weighted in surveys, are going to see a rising crime trend, at least some of them, distinct from what others experience.

Both by volume and severity, most crime falls upon the poorest who are likely underrepresented in the surveys and often in the statistics. Plenty of crime which does occur and which you do see on the nightly news, will never end up in the national crime statistics.

Beyond this acknowledging of factual conditions which go against their thesis and then ignoring it, Koerth and Thomson-DeVeaux have some occasional real clangers.

There’s a significant amount of evidence, too, that reporting on crime can prop up harmful stereotypes: Studies have found that local news media disproportionately portray Black people as perpetrators of crime, and white people as victims.

This has nothing to do with the mismatch between estimate of crime and actual crime argument. Why is it in the argument? Presumably their Social Justice/ Critical Theory lens requires it.

But it shouldn't be in here as it is demonstrably untrue. Relying on the FBI UCR crime statistics, it is quickly and easily demonstrable that across most categories of crime, most of them are disproportionately committed by African Americans and whites are disproportionately victims. For example, in 2019, some 50% of murders were committed by African American males, only some 7% of the population. Of course local news media are going to disproportionately report black males as perpetrators because that is what is true.

If Koerth and Thomson-DeVeaux don't know this basic reality, then all their other reporting comes into question. Is this simply left leaning battlefield prep for a political attack they are anticipating and would legitimately be vulnerable to?

But often, those fears can be blown out of proportion — not just by wall-to-wall murder coverage on the news, but also by politicians who bring up the crime rate in press conferences and interviews. President Trump is far from the first president to paint a dark vision of crime in American cities, but he is singularly obsessed with the topic, especially now.

Seems so.

But this is an odd one as well given this year's figures. If Koerth and Thomson-DeVeaux have been following along, they are aware of all the rioting in many cities governed by Democrats. They would be aware, just as happened after Ferguson, the de-policing in major cities has led to 50%, 100%, even 150% rises in murder rates (and other violent crime) in the past three months. Denying this verges on gas-lighting; very much a political move rather than a factual reporting.

Political gaslighting in order to protect from a likely effective political strategy by Trump is more and more apparent as you get deeper into the article.

Hakeem Jefferson, a political scientist at Stanford University who studies race and justice, told us that Black people’s views on criminal justice are complex, in part because they’re likelier than other demographic groups to actually live in high-crime neighborhoods and to be victims of crime. In other research, he’s found that some Black people have also internalized negative stereotypes about who commits crime, and may be more likely to embrace punitive solutions as a result.

You have to read that word salad pretty carefully because it omits a reality which apparently Koerth and Thomson-DeVeaux do not wish to acknowledge. Law and order generally plays well among African-Americans, particularly middle class African-Americans as they tend to be disproportionate victims of crime. Jefferson is correct that their views are complex because they are also disproportionately exposed when policing gets out of hand. But by far the greater danger to most citizens, black or white, are criminals and not the police.

The last few paragraphs descend into polemical posturing and almost surreal speculation.

This isn't worthy of being a 538 essay. This more like HuffPost reporting. It massacres the data in order to dress up a political polemic while gaslighting readers. The very opposite of 538's original intent as a platform.