Exaggerated monsters: crime in America
Most Americans have never heard of the Daily Mail newspaper. It’s a sensationalistic British rag with a sordid history, including being pro Hitler and pro Mussolini in the 1930s. The publication runs an on-line site trying to capture viewers in America, where they routinely misspell words or have convoluted headlines that say something entirely bizarre. Their knowledge of grammar is rather juvenile — but that insults children who don’t deserve it.
Trying to tap into the Trump zombie market the Mail has consistently lied about cities in the U.S. claiming increasing crime rates when things were largely stable or lower. To “prove” their case they selectively pick data. In any one year, for instance, some specific crimes are up and others down. The general and long-term trend could be downwards but by crafty selection of data you can get people to believe the opposite.
Today they claimed the Albany Park area of Chicago, which was a bit north of where I lived in my 20s, is facing out-of-control crime. Their headline says the area is “besieged by gun crime” but the article certainly makes it sound as if all crime is out of control in Albany Park and getting worse.
Albany Park is District 17 in Chicago’s Compstat crime reports so it’s quite easy to get the crime rate for that specific area and compare it to past years. Since the sleazy Mail mentions shooting incidents in the headline we can start there. As of October 31st, the total number of shooting incidents reported in Albany Park this year is 42. During the same period last year it was 55. That’s a decline of 24%. For the last 28 days Albany Park reported one shooting incident, compared to the same period last year when there were four. Coincidentally that one shooting is the one the Mail uses to prove shootings are out of control.
From January 1 to October 31 District 17 experienced five homicides. During the same period last year it had 10. Of course, when speaking of such relatively low numbers percentages are very deceptive. If you had one homicide last year and two this year that’s 100% increase, but it’s still only one more.
Robbery declined from 183 last year during this period to 136 this year, while aggravated battery reports dropped from 109 to 94. Criminal sexual assault is up by five incidents, from last year to 55, while burglaries are up 7%, from 199 to 212. Theft in general increased 15% from 325 to 375 while motor vehicle theft declined 15% from 240 to 205.
All in all this area of Chicago, described as having out of control crime, saw a decline in serious crime from 1116 in 2020 to 1082 in 2021 on a year-to-date basis. That’s a decline of 3%. The long-term trend for serious crime is even more pronounced.
Here are the total number of serious crimes reported in each year from the 1st of January to the 31st of October so we are comparing identical time periods
2021 1082
2020 1116
2019 1174
2018 1668
2017 1719
So serious crime in 2021 is 8% lower than in 2019, 35% lower than in 2018, and 37% lower than in 2017. This is what a crime surge looks like to the Daily Mail. And just in case people bring up the entire city it is worth looking at total number of serious crimes this year to date compared to last: 38,344 vs. 38,999, a decline of 2%. All serious crimes combined in 2021 are lower than they have been in the last several years; 2021 is 9% lower than 2019, 18% lower than 2018, and 25% lower than 2017.
Last month the panique de jour in the Daily Mail was how crime was out of control in New York City or as they put it continuing “to spike”. And to make sure their intellectually-challenged readers got the point, they ran the same story every day for days on end. They claimed, “Violent crimes continues to spike in NYC….” At the time they wrote this it wasn’t true. Official stats from January 1 until October 3 showed the opposite: a decline in serious crimes.
Compared to 2020 for the same period, total serious crime was down by 0.19%. Homicide was down 2.2%, rape was up 2.2%, robbery was down 4%, Felony assault was up 7%, burglary was down 22.9%; grand larceny was up 1.8% and grand larceny auto was up 14.6%. But, of these seven major crimes, the grand total of criminal acts declined from 71,550 to 71,413. Compared to previous years crime was down much more.
Over one year down 0.19%
Over two years down 0.6%
Over 11 years down 9.27%
Over 28 years down 77.98%
For much of 2020 New York City saw total serious crimes down slightly compared to 2020 but in October it rose to be slightly higher. With two months to go it could go either way but the difference is likely to be under 2% change. Small changes don’t tell us much.
One thing to be cautious about in all news reports is short-term trends, crime can be up on Tuesday but down the rest of the week. Then the rest of the year it could be up, but over a decade it could be down. Long-term trends are far more important than short-term ones. Often the statistically dishonest focus on a short-term trend because short-term data allows them to pick a time period to prove whatever they set out to prove. It isn’t honest, but it is politically effective. Longer trends are more revealing, short-term ones are often scarier.
While I think the Right cherry picks data more often than others, no political ideology is exempt and the more rabid the believer the more likely they are to cherry pick facts to suit their conclusion. Selective data allows them to cling to beliefs that simply aren’t supported by data on a whole.
The basic rule is anecdotes are not evidence. Some very dishonest writers concentrate only on stories found in the news but news hype doesn’t equal hard data. The reality is Americans think crime is getting worse, when the long-term trend line has been downward. It is pretty much safe to say that crime rates today are lower than they were in the year of your birth.
But with 24-hour news available any criminal incident anywhere in the country can make the news depending on the competition for coverage that day. Crime gets readers or butts in the seat before the TV and news outlets know it, so they make sure crime is covered heavily. When I was in school crime was much higher than today, but there was about 1 hour of news on television per day and only the local paper to read. So the number of stories I saw were limited and it felt safer, even though it wasn’t. Now the opposite is happening, plenty of anecdotes but little hard evidence. (For more on the role journalism plays in misconceptions about crime see: If It Bleeds, It Ledes: Good Journalism and Bad Thinking.)
Yahoo News reported a survey of 1,715 adults:
…just 14 percent — realize that violent crime remains lower today than in the 1990s. And while Republicans (73 percent) are more inclined to believe that violent crime is higher today than Democrats (49 percent) or independents (50 percent) are, the “highers” outnumber the “lowers” by wide margins across the political spectrum. Just 20 percent of Democrats (and just 16 percent of independents) think violent crime is lower today, for instance, while just 17 percent of Democrats (and just 13 percent of independents) think it’s “about the same.”
These false perceptions about “out-of-control” crime are used by Republicans routinely to terrify voters. Like politicians in general they are prone to use fear to rally the terrified. If it isn’t crime, it’s immigrants, or trans athletes, or terrorism, or non-existent Critical Race Theory courses in grade schools. As H.L. Mencken said: “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
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