No. of Recommendations: 8
The increased frequency and intensity of serious crimes, gun crimes, assaults, mass shootings, all of it is what is new. I don't think crime has been more or less constant for the last fifty years but we are just hearing about it more now with the internet and modern communications. People generally have
terribly inaccurate perceptions of crime. They always think crime is worse now than it used to be. Even during periods when it was utterly inarguable that it wasn't. Crime spiked in the U.S. from 1960 to a peak in the early 1990's, and then it collapsed again from the early 1990's to the present day. Even during the collapse, most people thought that crime was worse than it was ten years ago. We are terrible at estimating the relative level of crime compared to year's past; we are terrible at estimating the actual level of current crime:
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/10/10...https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/many-american...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_...We have a (mistaken) tendency to attribute crime to the problems of modernity. Yet it was just as worth your life to encounter the street gangs like the Bowery Boys or the Dead Rabbits in the 1850's, or to cross the Five Points Gang in the 1910's, as it was to run afoul of the criminals in 1970's and 1980's Alphabet City. We're just ignorant of the prevalence of crime outside of our own experience and time frame - and we (again) have a hagiographic tendency to underestimate how much crime was happening when were younger compared to today.
Nearly all crimes are
vastly lower than they were 30-40 years ago. Things are
nowhere near as bad as during the 1980's and early 1990's. Certain of the property crimes we've talked about on these recent threads, like burglary, are lower than they've been for nearly a century or longer (certainly for all the periods we have reliable and comparable data) - even with the recent uptick in some areas. If we're attributing our (probably mistaken) perception that these crimes are a greater problem today to
recent social phenomena, then that's clearly wrong.
Which makes trying to fix gun violence by tinkering with the levers of broad social policy
incredibly unlikely to be successful. We don't know why crime rose in the 1960's-1980's. We don't know why it collapsed utterly during the late 1990's through today. We intuitively think that modern things we hate (cell phone addiction, increased availability of drugs or guns, isolation and despair, lower marriage rates) are what's causing crime - but crime's been
falling while those things were around and increasing over the last 40 years.
Even though we think things are worse today, we're wrong - the 80's and 90's were when crime was
really bad, and today isn't much different from the 1960's and before for most crimes. Only homicide is different - but even there, our current rate of about 6.5 per 100K is much closer to that of the 1950's (5.1 per 100K) than the 1980's (10.4 per 100K).
https://www.statista.com/statistics/187592/death-r...
