Micah Loewinger: When it comes to fear around shoplifting it's more about vibes and dramatic footage than data. The same could be said about crime in general. Jeff Asher is a data analyst and co-founder of AH Datalytics. In his recent Substack column Americans Are Bad at Perceiving Crime Trends, he posed the question, why do people always think that crime is rising?

Male Speaker 7: The Gallup poll shows more Americans fear becoming victims of crime. A near record 40% say they're afraid to walk alone at night within a mile of their home.

Micah Loewinger: Every year Gallup conducts a survey about how crime is perceived in the US. Its latest results were released in October.

Female Speaker 10: The last time we saw this level of concern about crime was back in 1993 which Gallup points out was "one of the worst crime waves in US history."

Micah Loewinger: The problem with the way Gallup conducts the poll says Jeff Asher, is that while the term crime covers everything from jaywalking to theft when polled people go straight to murder.

Jeff Asher: It is the crime that people tend to think about the most but it only makes up 0.2% of all major crimes. We've created this situation where we're asking people, hey, what do you think about crime without actually defining it? It's like saying what do you think about football without defining do you mean American football? Do you mean soccer? Do you mean Premier League? Do you mean NFL? Do you mean college football? Do you mean my five-year-old's team?

Micah Loewinger: When it comes to the way that Gallup is asking people about their perceptions in crime which might also reveal the misconceptions people have in general, is that the people conducting the poll are baking the misconceptions into the questions with this kind of ambiguity.

Jeff Asher: Absolutely, because of the ambiguity if you mean major crime, major crime rose in 2022 because property crime after the artificial dip in 2020 and 2021 during Coronavirus where everybody was home, it went down and so it rose relative to that in 2022. Other types of crime, violent crime fell. Murder fell in 2022, but without knowing which of those the person the respondent is thinking about it's hard to necessarily respond.

Micah Loewinger: The second factor that you cite for why Americans aren't great at knowing how our country is doing on crime, is that specific questions about crime are actually hard to answer.

Jeff Asher: Things like violent crime have fallen substantially since the '90s. 40% decline in violent crime, large decreases in murder, large decreases in property crime since the '90s, but they're not asking if these things have changed since the '90s they're asking have things changed since last year, and the year-to-year changes have been way more subtle. Violent crime fell very slightly in 2022 according to the FBI data, it rose very slightly in 2021 according to the FBI data. If it's a 1 or 2% change in crime for 5 to 10 straight years, I think it's a lot harder for somebody that's not inherently a data expert to understand year on year whether or not it's going up or it's going down.

Micah Loewinger: Which brings us to your third point that the data is hard to come by. First off, can you just describe for us how national crime data get compiled?

Jeff Asher: Each agency reports each year, they have until April of the following year to send to typically their state UCR, state Uniform Crime Report program, all of the major crimes that occurred in a given year. They send it to their state UCR program. The state UCR program collects it, sends it to the FBI, the FBI collects it all and publishes it. There's a long lag between formally when these agencies get the data and when they have to report it up the chain, and when it's actually reported nationally. Usually, it's a 9 or 10-month lag.

There are a handful of agencies, probably a couple of dozen, maybe 100 agencies, that report their crime data directly on their website but there are 18,000 agencies nationwide. Yes, it's great that 100 agencies maybe do this, but that's a tiny sliver of all of the agencies. The vast majority of people that live in the United States live in a place where it's a desert for crime stat that are updated. It makes it really hard for people to necessarily answer a question of, is crime going up? You really have to go by the feels rather than the data.

Micah Loewinger: If we just acknowledge that the public perceptions of crime polling from Gallup were spotty in the '90s, I'm just curious if we go back to that decade, given the fact that in the '90s we had nearly 2 million violent crimes a year compared to now, when we're about 1.2 million. Were people saying similar things about crime then, too?

Jeff Asher: In the early '90s the data from Gallup shows that over 80% of people thought crime was going up. That was regardless of whether it was at its peak, which occurred in the early '90s. I think in many degrees, they were responding to the fact that it was really high and it wasn't necessarily falling really fast until the mid to late 90s. It did, in the early 2000s, bottom out at around 40% of the US believing that crime had risen in the United States, which is more correct but is still 40% of the public being wrong.

Micah Loewinger: Which brings us to point number four, which you describe as the media doesn't cover the planes that land. What did you mean by that?

Jeff Asher: It's the saying that Chris Hayes-

Micah Loewinger: The MSNBC host?

Jeff Asher: Yes. -mentioned on Twitter a couple of months ago that solidified a thought that I'd had in my head. It's a great saying because you think about it, there's never been a report that there were no robberies yesterday. There were no murders yesterday, there were no thefts yesterday. Sometimes you get like a streak of-

Micah Loewinger: Days since six straight--

Jeff Asher: -several days and there's no murders and maybe they're going to report it, or you get, "Hey, carjackings are falling 30%, we're going to report that," but there's never a day that the lack of a crime gets reported.

Micah Loewinger: Business as usual just isn't a story usually.

Jeff Asher: Right. I'm not blaming the media for necessarily covering these things, but in the vacuum of everything else that we've talked about, it makes it very difficult for people to deliver accurate impressions of what's actually happening. They get overwhelmed by the anecdote, and they don't consider the data.

Micah Loewinger: Number five, the last point on your list of why Americans are bad at perceiving crime is partisanship. How do Democrats and Republicans feel about crime now? Are there trends that you're looking at?

Jeff Asher: Between 2000 and 2020 when Bush was in office, more Democrats than Republicans thought crime was rising. When Obama was in office, more Republicans than Democrats thought crime was rising. When Trump was in office, more Democrats thought crime was rising. Under the Bush years, when crime was reasonably down, a majority of Democrats were saying that crime was rising each year. Now, over the last few years, things have gotten broken. In 2023, the Gallup survey showed 91% of Republicans saying that crime was rising in the last year, versus 58% of Democrats, which is the highest percentage of Democrats that have ever said that crime was rising.

Micah Loewinger: Yes, so there's two things going on. There's the fact that right-wing concern for crime rates. Is it an all time high?

Jeff Asher: Not even close. Prior to 2020, it was under 60% every year.

Micah Loewinger: Democrats too, are also citing higher crime rates, which flies in the face of a trend where typically their guy is in office, and therefore they would seem less concerned. Why? What accounts for these changes?

Jeff Asher: Previously, partisanship was a decent answer for this. Now it's some sort of hyper-partisanship broken media vacuum that's pumping wrong information and misinformation into the system and is leading to 9 out of 10 Republicans saying that crime is rising.

Micah Loewinger: I want to ask you about how journalists and news consumers can do a better job of closing the gap between the anecdote-born perceptions and the data. Our perceptions of crime and the facts. Readers, viewers, listeners, what should we keep in mind or look out for when we're consuming news about a crime?

Jeff Asher: We should keep in mind that crime data is generally flawed.

Micah Loewinger: Do you mean the numbers are wrong or that the numbers simply lack context, like year-to-year or decades-long trends, et cetera?

Jeff Asher: Yes, the numbers are wrong. They're always wrong. They're always estimates. They're estimates because not every agency reports, not every agency reports perfectly, and there's no good way of adding up data from 18,000 agencies and saying there were 18,242 murders last year. We just don't have that level of precision. We're always looking at estimates. That's very important to understand.

The second thing is that if pickpocketing in New Orleans surged in 2022, 50%, 70%, 80% increase, that doesn't mean that we have a rash of pickpockets, that we have a serious pickpocket problem. It just means that in 2021, we didn't have Mardi Gras, and in 2022, we did have Mardi Gras, and whenever there's Mardi Gras, you're going to have pickpockets. Looking at it just year to date does not tell you the story of what's going on. You need a longer-term view of what's happening. Year-to-date sometimes is the best that's available to us, but frequently, if you were choosing what analysis to do on data, you wouldn't do year-to-date, you'd show rolling over time.

Micah Loewinger: What's at stake when such a large portion of Americans have unfounded concerns about rise in crime?

Jeff Asher: Certainly from an electoral standpoint, it just leads to fear and not making choices based on reality. I think from a policymaker standpoint, it means that you're not necessarily making smart choices throughout the criminal justice system, how you're using your resources, the number of officers you're hiring, how you're approaching incarceration reform, how you're approaching sentencing reform, and just are people scared? Are they nervous? Are they worried? Do they think things are getting better or things are getting worse? I think in all facets of American life, when things are getting better we should have optimism.

I'm going to go to the feels now. It feels like we've lost some of that sense of optimism at the things that are getting better while still taking seriously those issues and taking seriously the issues that are getting worse.

Micah Loewinger: Jeff, thank you very much.

Jeff Asher: My pleasure.

Micah Loewinger: Jeff Asher is a writer and data analyst. His latest article, Americans Are Bad at Perceiving Crime Trends, is available on his Substack: Jeff-alytics. Coming up, mixing journalism and AI. What could go wrong? This is On The Media.

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