Reality check: What we get wrong about crime

American worry about crime; the number of people who think the crime rate is going up hasn’t been this high in decades.

Of course, certain crimes sometimes spike in certain places. But overall, I have some fantastic news: Nationwide, the crime rate has been steadily dropping for 30 years.

Here’s violent crimes, like murders, rapes, and robberies:

And here are property crimes like burglaries and thefts:

Now, it’s useful to ask where these numbers come from. The FBI keeps a database of all crimes reported by the police. The problem is, we don’t always report crimes to the police. People report a stolen car, but very few people report sexual assault.

It’s for that reason that, back in the 1970s, the Bureau of Justice Statistics began to survey people every year to ask about their experiences with crimes, whether or not they were actually reported. This is also a flawed method (you can’t very well interview a murder victim), but overall the news is good here, too.

Nobody’s really sure how to explain the drop. Maybe it’s better policing. Maybe it’s better security technology, or rising incomes, or lower unemployment. We’re also an aging society, and it is usually young folks who do the criming.

But whatever the reason, perception and reality are two different things, in a good way. Most of us think that crime is going up, but actually both data sources say it’s actually going down.

So, just this once, we should be happy to be wrong! 

     
Story produced by David Rothman. Editor: Emanuele Secci.

David Pogue

David Pogue is a six-time Emmy winner for his stories on “CBS Sunday Morning,” where he’s been a correspondent since 2002. Pogue hosts the CBS News podcast “Unsung Science.” He’s also a New York Times bestselling author, a five-time TED speaker, and host of 20 NOVA science specials on PBS. For 13 years, he wrote a New York Times tech column every week – and for 10 years, a Scientific American column every month.

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