Criminal tendencies

 People sometimes say that we are moving into a "post-truth" world where facts have less influence on what people think than they used to.  Paul Krugman had a column on perceptions of crime which didn't explicitly endorse this analysis, but seemed to lean in that direction.  He concluded "The good news is that . . . we seem to be heading back to the prepandemic normal of fairly low crime. The bad news is that the politics of fear can work, even if there isn’t much basis for those fears."   The column referred to a Gallup poll from October 2022 that found 56% of people thought that crime had increased in their area in the last year, which was the highest figure since they started asking the question in the early 1970s, even though the actual crime rate is substantially lower than it was in the 1970s and 1980s.

However, although the Gallup question speaks of more or less, some people volunteer that it's about the same.  In 1981, 54% said there was more crime in their area, 29% the same, and 8% less; in 2022, it was 56%, 14%, and 28%.  In general, the percent of "same" answers has been declining, so looking at changes in the average gives a different impression than looking at the "more" answers.

The figure shows the average, counting more as 1, less as -1, and same as 0.  There was a jump from 2020 to 2022, but the 2022 figure is still lower than the values for most of the 1970s and 1980s.  Also, perceptions seem to have responded to the decline in crime in the 1990s and early 2000s.  So if you consider the "same" answers, perceptions seem to have a better match to actual conditions.

I estimated a model in which perceptions depend on perceptions the last time the survey was taken and the change in the homicide rate over the last three years.*  The estimates are:

.029+(.90^gap)*LY+.053*X, where LY is perceptions in the previous survey, X is the change in the homicide rates and gap is the gap in years between the current survey and the previous one.  The estimated coefficient for X has a t-ratio of about 3.  

This is a pretty crude model, but it suggests that if we are returning to a period of lower crime, that perceptions can be expected to follow--or to put it another way, the "politics of fear" have less effect when there's less to fear.  However, Krugman also pointed to Gallup results indicating that Democratic and Republican perceptions of changes in crime rates have diverged recently.  I'll consider that issue in my next post.  

*I'm following the analysis in a post from 2014, in which I said I "used the last three years rather than the last year because I figured people probably didn't take the time frame all that literally."  That is, I just picked it because it seemed reasonable to me, not because I found it fit better than other possibilities.

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]