Rising Crime?

One the one hand, from FiveThirtyEight:

On the other hand, from Disrn:

Of course, even on the surface these headlines aren’t contradictory — it’s possible that overall crime is decreasing in the US but homicides in Portland are skyrocketing. It’s precisely this sort of explanation that FiveThirtyEight offers:

Crime rates do fluctuate from year to year. In 2020, for example, murder has been up but other crimes are in decline so that the crime rate, overall, is down. And the trend line for violent crime over the last 30 years has been down, not up. The Bureau of Justice Statistics found that the rate of violent crimes per 1,000 Americans age 12 and older plummeted from 80 in 1993 to just 23 in 2018. The country has gotten much, much safer, but, somehow, Americans don’t seem to feel that on a knee-jerk, emotional level.

But it would be uncharitable, and without rational basis, to link Americans’ current perceptions with Americans’ past perceptions grounded “on a knee-jerk, emotional level.”

It’s possible that American’s current perceptions are based on headlines like the one from Disrn above, which are based on alarming data and not simply on feelings. And, as I’m sure Koerth would agree, making the inference that crime has been in a consistent downward trend in the past and that, therefore, will see that it is on that same trend in 2020 is too hasty. As the NYT article that Koerth links to points out:

Jerry Ratcliffe, a professor of criminal justice at Temple University and host of the Reducing Crime podcast, has cautioned against comparing crime figures in one year with the previous year. This year’s upheaval may be even more reason to be cautious.

In addition, given the odd circumstances of 2020 there might not be reasons for optimism on the rate of overall decline in relation to the skyrocketing homicide rates. In other words, I wonder whether a lot of crimes are dropping in ways that are tied to the lockdown and virus. Are there significantly less home burglaries and robberies because significantly more people are home? If that’s the case then once you remove those conditions then whatever is driving the dramatic increase in homicides might likewise contribute to a dramatic increase in overall crimes.