American carnage

According to Donald Trump's inaugural address yesterday, "the crime and gangs and drugs" are running rampant in America.  Does the public see it this way?  A couple of years ago, I had a post about perceived changes in the crime rate in "your area."  But perceived changes in the national crime rate are probably more relevant here.  Since 1989, the Gallup poll has frequently asked about whether crime in the United States is higher or lower than it was a year ago.  The figure shows a summary of responses (logarithm of the ratio of "higher" to "lower") to questions about the United States and "your area."

 Over the whole period, more people see crime as up in the nation than in their own area.  That's a common pattern--people generally see things close to them as being better than things far away.  But there has been very little change in perceptions at either level over the last ten years or so.  There are several things that seem like they might have led to a perception of increased crime in the nation--well-publicized terrorist incidents, protests associated with the Black Lives Matter movement, a real increase in the murder rate in 2015 and 2016--but there's no sign that they made much difference.

This is more evidence for something I said in a recent post:  Americans are not particularly angry or fearful now.  In my view, Trump won because of a combination of partisanship, popular positions on some issues [economic nationalism], and plain luck, not because he was particularly in tune with the "spirit of the age."

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]