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Why do Americans always think crime is going up?

Crime is actually falling. Here are three theories on why that doesn't seem to reassure voters.

by Abdallah Fayyad

With the 2024 campaign underway, politicians from both parties have been sounding the alarm about rising crime rates.

But the pandemic-era spike in crime actually seems to have subsided. The first three months of 2024 showed a historic decline in crime rates compared with the same period last year, according to the latest data from the FBI. Murder, for example, is down 26 percent, and robberies dropped 18 percent. Crime rates now look more like they did pre-Covid, steadily declining as they had been since the 1990s.

And yet, the majority of Americans still believe that crime is only getting worse. A 2023 Gallup poll showed that 77 percent of Americans believed that crime was increasing across the country. That might help explain why lawmakers have been overreacting to the short-lived rise, taking a tough-on-crime approach to public safety, including imposing harsher penalties and increasing police surveillance.

The big disconnect between public perception of crime and the reality isn’t new. In fact, since 2002, the same annual poll has repeatedly shown that the majority of Americans — often over 60 percent — believe that crime is on the rise even when it’s falling. Other polls have found similar results, showing that many Americans believe crime is a serious national problem, one that voters consistently consider to be among their chief concerns come election time.

It’s hard to explain why Americans feel the way they do about crime. Part of the answer might be that Americans aren’t entirely ignoring reality: The United States is, after all, a more violent country than its peers, having the highest homicide rate among affluent nations.

But Gallup’s annual poll might be telling us something deeper: that fear of crime is deeply embedded in American society, and positive news about falling crime rates won’t simply make that fear go away.

Most of us tend to think of crime in the abstract — not as something that is happening to us but something we read about in the news, see on social media, or hear about from politicians running for office every cycle. According to the same Gallup poll, about 3 percent of Americans report being victimized by a violent crime. And while 17 percent of Americans believe that crime is an extremely or very serious problem in their neighborhoods, 63 percent believe it’s an extremely or very serious problem in the country as a whole.

So what could be driving the big, consistent gap between public perception and reality? Here are three theories:

Fearmongering “law-and-order” campaigns are a constant in American politics

One of the major drivers that shapes public opinion about crime is “what folks with the biggest platforms and megaphones say, and that is the politicians, especially in an election,” said Insha Rahman, vice president of advocacy and partnerships at the Vera Institute of Justice. “And we’re basically perennially in election season.”

In each of his three presidential campaigns, former president Donald Trump has spent a considerable amount of time on the trail talking about crime, lawlessness, and public disorder, vowing to put tough policies in place to bring an end to the supposed chaos. And much of his rhetoric focuses on cities, which he has claimed are “crime-infested,” “hellholes,” and “cesspools of bloodshed and crime” that are “falling apart.” In 2020, Trump painted the George Floyd protests as an example of urban lawlessness, going so far as to tweet the segregationist phrase “when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” encouraging police to use violent force against protesters.

Trump followed the mold of the quintessential “law-and-order” campaign, drumming up fear about supposed crime, leaning on racist tropes and dog whistles, and conjuring a picture of cities that residents wouldn’t recognize.

For decades, American politicians — and especially Republicans — have run political campaigns that put crime front and center, even when crime rates are on the decline. This style of campaigning dates back to the 1960s, when Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater launched a “law-and-order” presidential campaign against Lyndon Johnson and used crime as a way to implicitly talk about race.

As Vesla Weaver, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins, told the Marshall Project in 2020, when it started becoming unpopular to explicitly oppose equal rights for Black people, politicians instead started “talking about the urban uprisings—Blacks’ response to political and economic exploitation—they start attaching it to street crime, to ordinary lawlessness.”

Republican presidents like Richard Nixon, George H. W. Bush, and Donald Trump all focused on urban crime as a way to stir up white suburban voters in particular. Bush, for example, ran the now-infamous Willie Horton ad in 1988, which focused on the story of a Black man who, while on furlough from prison, raped a white woman. Horton was in Massachusetts, where Bush’s Democratic opponent, Michael Dukakis, was governor. Bush’s move, a direct challenge that Democrats were “soft on crime,” essentially put Democrats on the defensive ever since.

When she was first lady in the 1990s, Hillary Clinton helped amplify the panic around the since-debunked “superpredator” myth: that crime was going to explode because of a growing, largely Black and brown urban youth population that was supposedly responsible for a significant portion of violent crime.

National media — especially opinion and commentary publications — also took the theory and ran with it. According to the Marshall Project, the country's leading newspapers and magazines used the term "superpredator" nearly 300 times between 1995 and 2000, when crime had started to decline. The majority of times, the term was used uncritically.

“It’s a vicious cycle,” Rahman said. “There’s a latent concern about crime — it always sits there as a second-tier issue for voters. And if you play upon that as a politician, and you campaign and you really spark fear around the issue, you watch it grow as a top voting issue. That’s absolutely what happens.”

Today, “law-and-order” campaigns aren’t limited to presidential hopefuls. Candidates for local and statewide office routinely emphasize or overstate crime, and that includes Democrats as well. Eric Adams, the Democratic mayor of New York City, for example, was elected in 2021 after running a campaign that focused on crime and vowed to beef up law enforcement. Since then, both he and Kathy Hochul, the Democratic governor of New York, have emphasized crime as a very serious problem, imposing tough-on-crime policies, even though crime has been declining in the city.

Adams’s 2021 campaign “was centered on one thing and one thing alone, which was crime,” Rahman said, adding that his rhetoric caused media mentions of crime to skyrocket. “It literally tracked with voter surveys about voters’ concerns about crime.”

Indeed, as the campaign went on, crime became increasingly salient, eventually becoming the single most important issue for Democratic primary voters in that race. Between April and May of that year, the share of voters who considered crime and public safety to be their top concern rose by 14 percentage points, according to a NY1/Ipsos poll.

Media coverage of crime often distorts reality

When politicians repeatedly bring up crime, the media inevitably responds by covering it. But news outlets, and local media in particular, also often focus a lot of their attention on crime.

“One of the challenges, historically, with the way that we have covered crime is that we usually just cover individual incidents, and there’s very little context for how crime trends are moving overall in our communities,” said Cheryl Thompson-Morton, director of the Black Media Initiative for the Center for Community Media at the City University of New York’s journalism school.

Media outlets dedicate entire sections to coverage of crime, making it a significant part of Americans’ news digest. While journalists should certainly cover crime in their communities, the way that it’s often so prominently featured and prioritized might make people feel like it’s a constant problem that never subsides. Today, there’s also the added layer of social media.

One recent example is the shoplifting panic. A perceived spike in shoplifting — bolstered by faulty data — received a lot of media attention. Story after story in media outlets called the supposed phenomenon an epidemic, and alleged that shoplifting was becoming normalized in many US cities. Viral videos of people brazenly shoplifting without facing any consequences likely helped fuel the panic, making it seem like that kind of petty theft is extremely common. Those kinds of videos also often drew news outlets’ attention, resulting in even more stories.

As more data was collected, however, it became clear that while there may have indeed been an increase in shoplifting, it was hardly as severe as the reports suggested. In fact, in many places, shoplifting seems to have been declining just as these news reports were coming out.

By the time it was clear that the shoplifting wave had been overstated, it was already too late. Despite an effort by many media outlets to correct the record, many Americans had already formed an impression it was a problem that was spinning out of control. And after years of progressive criminal justice reforms — which included lowering penalties for petty crimes and, in some cases, choosing not to prosecute those cases — many politicians seized on the panic showing a dramatic increase in shoplifting to promote tough-on-crime policies similar to those passed in the 1990s, including by lowering the threshold for what constitutes a felony.

“Covering these individual incidents of crime often, as we typically do, often do not help make people feel safer,” Thompson-Morton said.

When crime is sensationalized, Americans can’t look away

One problem with the way politicians talk about crime and with the way the media covers it is that they often focus on incidents that will grab people’s attention. That’s likely why the Bush campaign, for example, chose to exploit the Willie Horton case — precisely because it played to people’s fears about prisoners and old racist tropes about Black men.

When crimes that might be relatively rare are given outsized weight in the media, people start to believe that they’re more common than they actually are. It also leads to a vicious feedback loop: Tough-on-crime politicians repeatedly talk about a case, media outlets cover it, and people become extremely interested in it, encouraging politicians to continue exploiting the case and more media coverage.

Take the case of Laken Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student who was killed earlier this year. The story played into Republicans’ narrative about immigration — Trump started his 2016 campaign talking about how people crossing the southern borders were criminals and rapists — because the alleged killer had entered the United States illegally. The case became so prominently featured in Republican campaigns that President Joe Biden mentioned it in his State of the Union address, after Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene confronted him about it.

Studies show, however, that immigrants aren’t more likely to commit crimes than native-born citizens. In fact, some studies show that immigrants might be less likely to commit crimes than people born in the US. But when one horrific incident like Laken Riley’s is sensationalized, it can quickly affect public opinion: One poll, for example, showed that the majority of Americans believe that migration is leading to more crime, despite all evidence that points to the contrary.

So while law-and-order campaigns feed off sensationalizing crime, they are often actually about something else: stirring up fear of a changing society.

Crime is likely to keep coming up as a 2024 campaign issue

As with his previous campaigns, Trump has spent a lot of time talking about crime, despite falling crime rates, and he’s likely to bring it up during his debates with Biden.

Regardless of where crime rates actually stand, the fact that so many people believe that crime is not only a serious problem but one that’s actively getting worse has resulted in Republicans and Democrats trying to prove their tough-on-crime bona fides. Even officials in the Biden administration, for example, have told progressives that they went “too far” on criminal justice reforms and that they should look for a more “sensible approach.”

That means that between now and November, and potentially beyond, both parties are likely to push for tougher laws and harsher enforcement.

But whatever candidates will say about combating crime, one thing is clear: Crime isn’t actually getting worse – even if the majority of Americans think it is.