Crime rates are dropping, for the most part, in Tucson, according to TPD stats.

But Republicans seeking seats on the City Council and supporters of the Public Safety First Initiative say crime is out of control. And they say they’ve got polling that shows that people believe it.

Ryan Sager at Neuroworld looks at some numbers that show the public almost always believes crime is on the rise, no matter what the actual crime trends are:

With the exception of 2001 and 2002 (9/11 effect?), between 52% and 89% of Americans every year since 1990 have thought that crime is on the rise. That’s a pretty remarkable statistic, given that crime declined steadily nationally throughout the 1990s and has remained essentially level in the 2000s. Whatever the year-to-year correspondence is, we know that people have gotten the big picture wildly wrong, year after year.

That is, people pretty much always seem to think that this year is worse than last, regardless of the actual trends.

Does this sound like anything else to you? How about: This generation is so much stupider/lazier/ruder than the last; politics is so much dirtier these days; the world is going to hell in a hand basket.

For whatever reason, this seems to be the default human predisposition. Is it availability bias? You hear about some terrible things happening during the course of every year, and — slowly forgetting all the terrible things that happened the year before and the year before that and so on — you assume that this year must be the worst ever?

This article appears in Oct 15-21, 2009.

Getting hassled by The Man Mild-mannered reporter

3 replies on “Crimes Rates: Hell In a Handbasket!”

  1. Nice try at a diversion, but the basic question here is – do we FORCE the folks who so easily spend out money to spend it on art (see your other article this week) or public saftey. The council freely admits that it’s hard to make their funding goals in a down economy. Right they are, as they have spent so much on useless junk that benefits their idea of a “good deed.” So what if the public has different opinion that some data source shows? That’s not the issue here. The public is in charge and if they decide to spend things on something they want, well, it’s their money, isn’t it? Or do you folks at the Weekly favor Big Brother after all? I’m never sure, since one week you love him and the next you loath him. Conflicted, are we?

  2. Dan you are so right. The more I read of the Weekly the more I realize they don’t deserve the advertisers dollars due to their hatred of private institutons. Good to find a kindred spirit on here.

  3. Dan, I’m sorry I missed your comment before now. What I wrote was not meant to be a diversion. It was meant to look at an interesting trend in perception vs. reality. As far as not knowing exactly what we think on every issue: Well, I think I just find the world to be a more complex place than you do, and so it’s not as easy for me to put things in Box A or Box B. It’s that conflicted, then I plead guilty as charged.

    Klingon, I’d have to say that suggesting I have a “hatred of private institutions” is a radical interpretation of the text.

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