Due to Alarmist, Sensationalistic, Decontextualized and Racist Media Coverage, Americans are Overestimating Crime in their Neighborhoods

From [HERE] Americans are overestimating crime in their neighborhoods. In a recent USA Today/Ipsos poll, 62 percent of Americans believed that crime had gotten worse in the United States, but a plurality felt that their own community was no more dangerous, closely paralleling the results of a Navigator poll. “Citizens have only the mass media to rely on for information about the national crime picture, and that information is often alarmist, sensationalistic, and decontextualized,” Mark Warr, a sociologist.

Americans are freaked out about crime in the United States. As many as eight in 10 say it’s a major problem. They rank it ahead of health care and poverty, perennial priorities. Solid majorities believe that crime is worse today than it was 30 years ago, which is not even close to true, despite record increases in homicides in 2020.

This fear about crime has potentially large implications. President Joe Biden, eager to show that the White House is paying attention, launched a series of crime-fighting initiatives focused on guns last month. Republicans have sought to tie Democratic support for cutting police budgets to the rise in crime, and local and congressional efforts at police reform could all be shaped by the public’s views on crime.

But ask Americans how things look in their own communities, and in survey after survey, they evince much less worry. In a recent USA Today/Ipsos poll, 62 percent of Americans believed (correctly) that crime had gotten worse in the United States, but a plurality felt that their own community was no more dangerous, closely paralleling the results of a Navigator poll. In a Washington Post/ABC News poll, 59 percent saw crime as a serious problem nationally, but only 17 percent felt the same way about their own area. This split is not new, but it may be widening. In November, Gallup recorded the largest difference ever: 78 percent of Americans said crime was rising year over year nationwide, but only 38 percent said it was up in their area.

Americans are onto something. “Violent crime in particular is hugely concentrated,” Wesley G. Skogan, a political scientist at Northwestern University, wrote to me in an email. “Unlike Lake Wobegone, almost all neighborhoods are below average.”

The divergent views of crime locally and nationally produce two divergent possibilities for fighting the increase in violence. Politicians could take worries about national crime as a cue to pursue blunt and simplistic answers of the past, including stricter sentencing and over-policing. But the nuanced views among the public suggest that policy makers have the flexibility to devise locally appropriate strategies for crime.

Some crime trends do move nationally: From the 1970s to the 1990s, crime surged nationwide, followed by a marked decrease. At the peak, in 1991, there were almost 10 murders per 100,000 people. By 2014, that had dropped to 4.4 per 100,000. In 2020, murders surged in most American cities, producing the largest increase in murder rate on record, at an estimated 6.6 per 100,000. Understanding the broad trends is important, but most crime-fighting is local, and the federal government has little role. Or as Skogan put it, “What the heck is ‘crime in the nation’?”

Opinion polls have long shown that Americans overestimate the level of crime in the country, as the Pew Research Center’s John Gramlich has written. Even amid a historic decline in crime rates, majorities in surveys said they believed that crime was on the rise. Much of the blame for this misperception likely falls on the press. The media tend to follow the maxim “If it bleeds, it leads”—violence tends to earn coverage. Criminologists say that this is especially true of television journalism.

“Citizens have only the mass media to rely on for information about the national crime picture, and that information is often alarmist, sensationalistic, and decontextualized,” Mark Warr, a sociologist who has studied the perception of crime, wrote in an email. “So crime nationally often looks much worse than it is.” But even as Americans fret about national crime rates, they see the situation in their home community as largely stable. Scholars believe that citizens are aware enough to tell what’s really going on around them, despite especially crime-focused local news coverage. [MORE]