This opinion piece explores the disconnect between public perception and the actual statistics regarding crime rates and economic health in the United States. The author points out that despite a significant drop in violent crime since the 1990s, polls consistently show a majority of Americans believing crime is increasing. Similarly, the public perception of the economy often contradicts positive economic indicators.
The article suggests several reasons for these misperceptions. The author argues that lack of time for in-depth analysis of policy issues, coupled with reliance on potentially biased media and political narratives, contributes to these inaccurate perceptions. People's daily lives often don't provide enough firsthand experience to counter these biased narratives.
The author draws a parallel between the misperceptions about crime and the economy, highlighting the striking similarity in the discrepancies between public opinion and statistical realities in both areas. This similarity reinforces the argument about the influence of media and political discourse on shaping public perceptions.
The piece concludes by challenging the notion that questioning these widely held beliefs automatically labels someone as an 'elitist'. It emphasizes that this issue isn't about intelligence, but rather about the limited time and information available to many citizens, leading to a reliance on often-inaccurate sources.
Remember “American carnage?” Donald Trump’s 2017 inaugural address was peculiar in many ways, but one of the most striking oddities was his obsession with a problem — urban crime — that had greatly diminished over the past generation. For reasons we still don’t fully understand, violent crime in America fell rapidly from around 1990 to the mid-2010s:
True, there was a crime surge after the pandemic, which now seems to be ebbing. But that lay in the future. Trump talked as if crime was running rampant as he spoke.
Yet if Trump had false beliefs about trends in crime, he had plenty of company. Gallup polls Americans about crime every year, and all through the great decline in violent crime a majority of Americans said that crime was increasing:
Were the crime statistics misleading? Homicide numbers are pretty solid. And people behaved as if crime were falling; notably, there was a wave of gentrification as affluent Americans moved into newly safe central cities. But all the same, people told pollsters that they believed crime was rising.
Why am I talking about public perceptions of crime? Well, last week, I wrote about the gap between public perceptions of a terrible economy and the reality of an economy that is doing very well by normal standards. I also noted that Americans seem relatively upbeat about their own financial circumstances; they just think that bad things are happening to other people.
Not surprisingly, I got a lot of pushback. That’s OK; after all these years writing for The Times I have a pretty thick skin, although I have to admit to being annoyed at pundits who try to cut off discussion by asserting that anyone who questions widely held beliefs is an “elitist” who thinks Americans are stupid. For the record, I don’t think Americans are stupid. I think they have jobs to do and children to raise and lives to live. They don’t have time to study policy issues, so most of them get their sense of what’s happening to the country from what they see on TV or hear from politicians. Unfortunately, some of what they’re told isn’t true.
But in any case, I thought it might be useful to draw parallels with the discourse on crime, where there is a similar disconnect between what people tell pollsters they believe is happening and what the available facts say. In fact, the resemblance between how people talk about crime and how they talk about the economy is eerily strong.
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