Why are Americans unwilling to believe good news about crime?

What happens

The best data we have shows that violent crime in the United States has declined significantly in recent years. But ask the average American, and they will tell you with certainty that the number is actually rising.

According to the FBI's preliminary analysis, crimes such as murder, rape and assault declined at a potentially record-breaking pace in 2023, offsetting a pandemic-era surge in violent crime and bringing national rates down to their lowest levels ever. Rates of property crimes such as burglary and theft also declined.

Yet in poll after poll, Americans continue to say crime is on the rise. In a poll late last year, 77 percent of respondents said crime is getting worse, and two-thirds said crime is an extremely or very serious problem. The last time Americans were this pessimistic about crime was in the early 1990s, when the violent crime rate was more than twice what it is today.

This gap between perception and reality has real-world implications. The campaign for police and criminal justice reform gained significant momentum during the nationwide protest movement following the killing of George Floyd in 2020. But it has largely stalled—and in some cases, been pushed back—as members of both parties have returned to “tough on crime” policies.

Republicans have also tried to make crime a central issue in the upcoming election, often linked to immigration, based on the false claim that migrants are creating a national crime wave. They also frequently misrepresent crime rates in large cities run by Democrats. Former President Donald Trump, in response to his own convictions, claimed that crime in New York was “rampant,” even though the city is among the safest in the country. Polls suggest that despite this misleading message, voters trust Republicans much more than Democrats to fight crime.

Why there is a debate

Part of this discrepancy seems to be due to human nature. We tend to give more weight to negative events – whether we experience them ourselves or just hear about them – than to times when everything is going well. Gallup has been conducting surveys on perceptions of crime for 25 years, and almost every year a majority of people say it is increasing, even though the actual crime rate has fallen by more than half over the same period.

Experts say there are also many cultural forces that feed our inclination toward crime. Watching the news or using social media, which often focuses on violent acts by individuals taken out of context, can make crime seem much more prominent than it actually is. This is especially true for conservative media outlets that have a vested interest in pushing the narrative that crime is on the rise.

Politics also plays a big role. Republicans have been promoting the idea that crime is out of control for decades, especially in Democratic cities like New York and Chicago, to attack their liberal rivals and gain sympathy for their “tough on crime” policies. But Democrats have largely struggled to counter these attacks with a coherent narrative that highlights the progress made without dismissing voters' concerns.

However, some conservative analysts argue that the data is simply wrong and that crime has not actually declined as much as the numbers suggest. While the FBI's numbers are the closest to national crime rates, they are far from perfect. They do not include data from all law enforcement agencies in the country and only take into account crimes that were actually reported to police.

Critics say it's possible that the actual decline in reported crimes is the share of crimes reported, either because people have recently distrusted the police or because some departments have had resources cut, rather than the actual crime rate itself. As evidence for this claim, they point to data showing that the share of people who say they have been the victim of a crime – whether it was reported or not – actually increased in 2022 after falling during the height of the pandemic.

Perspectives

Good news is ignored

“The old saying goes, if it bleeds, it leads: sensationalist stories attract press attention. More positive stories, such as the absence of crime, are likely to get less attention.” — David A. Graham, The Atlantic

Republicans want the public to believe that crime is rampant, and Democrats are not eager to counter that message.

“Politically speaking [Republicans]it would have been helpful if the statistics had shown just the opposite. If the murder rate had gone up, that would have been a useful tool to denigrate Democrats and take some of the pressure off Trump. Democrats, on the other hand, could use the positive statistics to bolster policies promoted by the current administration, but they're pretty quiet about it because they really want to keep the spotlight on the abortion issue and Trump's trial.” — EJ Montini, Arizona Republic

Crime has not really decreased; it has just been reported less

“Americans are not wrong. News reports fail to take into account that many victims do not report crimes to police, especially since the pandemic.” — John R. Lott Jr., Wall Street Journal

Social media turns rare incidents into viral moments

“The proliferation of social media and video technology has made it infinitely easier to film and publicize a viral crime case like a large-scale shoplifting spree. Millions of property crimes occur every year, but these exceptional cases become the yardsticks people rely on when estimating whether crime is increasing or decreasing. My neighbors never post on NextDoor how many thousands of packages they successfully received, only videos of the one that happened to get swiped.” – Jeff Asher, crime data analyst, via Substack

Conservative media strive to spread a false image of crime

“Even though crime is going down, Fox still talks about crime as if it's going up. It often does this by cherry-picking: picking a city or a statistic where crime has gone up and then focusing on that. Often, though, it simply presents it as a given, which the audience — given what they see on the news — takes for granted.” — Philip Bump, Washington Post

Bad data obscures real crime in the US

“I wouldn't say the FBI is cooking the books, but the data they're releasing is crude. … So it's not a conspiracy, it's a rush job, and people are being given the wrong picture. They conclude something is true, and then they don't bother to correct it because it's politically expedient.” — Sean Kennedy, executive director of the Coalition for Law, Order and Security, told Real Clear Investigations

The chaos of recent years has left people uneasy and distrustful of the world around them.

“The bottom line is that concern about crime is often an indicator of broader fears about social unrest. Public safety is about more than just the number of robberies and assaults that occur in a given year; it's also about whether people feel safe leaving their homes. And that sentiment has been all wrong for the past four years.” — Ethan Corey, The Appeal