Why Fear of Crime is Increasing

Why it is amplifying calls for more law and order and what we can do to prevent it

My email is public, and I occasionally get some user ‘feedback’, where ‘feedback’ is a euphemism for angry, spittle-spewing diatribes. Anything about firearms or policing is sure to induce this response, but there are unexpected interest groups around every topic—for instance, when I write about the crime decline, I am sure to get at least one email saying, “what are you talking about, we all know the crime decline was about lead.” But lead aside, overwhelmingly the gist of these comments is that I am just shining up DNC talking points. Now, I’m not sure where one acquires DNC talking points and though I would be curious to read them, I can’t parrot what I haven’t read.

Nevertheless, there is some fairness to these critiques. Isn’t there some bias from picking a topic in the first place (and not picking some other topic)? The researcher's cost-benefit model is straightforward: their time is constrained, so, if you can only take on a couple of new projects a year—do you really want to take on one that is not interesting to you? And because it is interesting to you, isn’t it likely that it is at least somewhat aligned with your prior beliefs?  

Having said all that, today I want to take on a topic that is probably not a DNC talking point and one that I really don’t have any prior about. I am genuinely curious whether disorder is increasing in America and whether that has important political and policy ramifications. My spoiler is that I’m not sure whether disorder is or is not increasing, but I think it does not matter. Because when you dig into the relationship between fear and disorder the most reasonable conclusion is that our collective tolerance for disorder is declining.

This isn’t because the media is getting worse or our politics are getting worse—they are of course, but it really is beside the point. The point is more insidious. The point is simply that collectively we are getting older and wealthier, and older and wealthier people have less tolerance for disorder.  And because of this, regardless of whether this decline in tolerance is objectively merited, it is nevertheless an important—and ongoing—trend. It is one that politicians and the public would be foolish to ignore. Historically, any number of great injustices have been imposed in the name of maintaining order, and we are increasingly entering a period where calls for order will only increase.

Incivilities, Physical, and Social Disorder

First, some housekeeping. I define disorder as rule-breaking that does not rise to the level of criminal conduct—social disorder like loitering boisterously, playing loud music, driving without care, and physical disorder, such as the presence of trash and graffiti. Professor Ralph Taylor at Temple University labels disorder as ‘incivilities’ which I find to be the right framing, and argues, [i]Incivility indicators are social and physical conditions in a neighborhood that are viewed as troublesome and potentially threatening by its residents and users of its public spaces (the Taylor article begins on page 65: https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/Digitization/179856-179864NCJRS.pdf). 

Taylor draws on the work of Professor Al Harris (see the graphic below), who posits that while disorder may lead to crime, it independently affects fear of crime. So, being in a disordered place can cause people to believe there is more crime, even if there isn’t. Importantly, Harris notes that there is blame associated with those fears, where “perceivers conclude that the external agencies of control, which bear some responsibility for preserving order, are unwilling or incapable of doing so in that locale” (Taylor, 1999: 167).

What’s really interesting about the Taylor hypothesis is that the perception of a threat is the thing that makes something disorderly. And perceptions are, of course, subjective and subject to all kinds of biases. To take a benign example, a tourist and a resident standing in the same spot are likely to view the exact same behaviors and visual cues around them very differently. I’m sure you can think of less benign examples. This begs the very interesting question of who has standing to determine that something is a threat—whose perceptions matter—but we will leave that for another day. The key point is that the perceived risk of crime and victimization is not necessarily related to the actual risk.

Is America Experiencing an Unusual Level of Disorder?

Americans certainly seem to think we are in an exceptionally dangerous and disordered moment. Now, Americans almost always think things are going to hell—for eighteen consecutive years Gallup has found that more than 60 percent of respondents believe crime is worse this year than last year (even though violence declined nationally in 12 of those 18 years). But even with that caveat, a Gallup report from last October finds the highest rates of perceived increases in local crime in decades. So, let’s try and unpack this a little because the explanations are not as obvious as they may first appear.

Why do Americans Perceive that Disorder is Getting Worse?

Following Taylor’s reasoning, there are two main explanations for why people’s perceptions of crime and crime risk are spiking. One reason would be that the risk of victimization is increasing. So, is the risk of victimization actually increasing? A little interpretation of the Gallup data helps answer this question.

In the Gallup data, by the end of the 1990s, perceptions of the change in local crime (the blue line) and perceptions of the change in national crime (the green line) are highly correlated, meaning that the trends move together—they move together even though the national rates are about 20 percentage points (or 50%) higher than the local rates for every year since 2005.

How does that correspond to actual crime? Not terribly well. Jeff Asher maintains a public-facing homicide dashboard. His recent graphic is below and shows that homicide (as a proxy for violence) decreased or was stable most years since 2005 during the same period Americans told Gallup everything was going to hell. Yes, from 2019 to 2020 there was the largest one-year increase in homicide ever recorded (28%). But other types of victimization were mainly steady or down.

In the most recent period, the last couple of years, Gallup shows a very unusual spike in perceived violent threats. The story in the data is much more mixed. The Asher data shows a big spike in 2020 and 2021, but then a precipitous decline (Asher said this week that 2023 may end up having the largest one-year decline in crime ever). More expansive data also show this same mixed story. In 2021, according to the Council on Criminal Justice, assaults increased about 10% as did robbery (6%) but residential burglary declined steeply (-23%). So, the actual crime data was mixed, while perceptions of crime risk spiked. 

Is Disorder Spiking?

The other explanation for the Gallup data is that physical and social disorder are at abnormally high levels signaling that the risk of victimization is spiking as well (whether it manifests in more victimization or not). This hypothesis—that changes in disorder cause people to perceive that they are at greater risk—is much harder to measure. Taylor posits five indicators: vandalism, unsupervised or rowdy teens, abandoned buildings, the proportion of residents living in the community for at least 5 years, and the proportion of homeowning respondents.  The last two are measures of stability and poverty.

So, are these indicators of disorder getting worse? On the contrary. In the COVID period, those indicators are extremely positive, with big increases in both homeownership and disposable income.

The two tables below are from the Federal Board of St. Louis, known lovingly in the data community as FRED. The first shows homeownership rates since 1960 which is a key measure of disorder. And the picture is rosy—homeownership rates are now higher than they were in 1980 which was the historical peak if you exclude the 2000s where homeownership rates were artificially inflated with bad loans and fraud. So that’s one big strike against rising disorder.

A second big strike against rising disorder is American wealth. Now measuring American wealth is a tricky business and there are real fights about whether the American middle class is better off or worse off. And really important, valid concerns about inequality. And gender disparities. And racial disparities. But the Pew Research Center graphic below is adjusted for the cost of living and measures the median household incomes. Is the increase too slow, too unequal, and too racially disparate? Yes to all. Of course. But the growth in wealth is also real.

The other big indicator of disorder is the presence of young people, which is declining proportionately (more on that later).

Anyway, the net takeaway is that the data show that predictors of disorder are overwhelming improving. Thus, there is little in the data to suggest that America is getting more disorderly.

Merging the Narratives

So, if measures of disorder point to less disorder, and objective measures of crime point to declines from a relatively modest peak, then what are Americans so afraid of? While it is possible that some hard-to-measure disorder (such as vandalism and unsupervised or rowdy teens) is increasing, it is likely that something else is going on.  What are the most likely candidates?

There are several. One candidate is that disorder is changing in ways that the data are not observing. For instance, several cities have reduced fines or decriminalized some low-level offenses, from urinating in public to marijuana possession. This has led to the hypothesis that decriminalization has allowed disorder to become anchored in places that have a history of disorder and that disorder has spread to places where order is the historical norm.

Another possible explanation is that highly visible indicators of disorder, like speeding and reckless driving, which seem to have peaked during the pandemic, have continued and are sending new kinds of signals of disorder.

The media certainly gets and deserves a share of the blame. Jessica Beard, a trauma surgeon and academic researcher at Temple University says, “We know that media reports can influence public opinion and actions through framing and agenda-setting, and they can help the public understand complex social problems.” But media that relies on episodic reporting—the sort of dehumanizing, if-it-bleeds-it-leads reporting that has become all too common, “can lead audiences to blame victims and communities, and they can make people fearful.”

Or it could just be that one political party is using crime as a cudgel to beat up the other party.

The Decoupling of Crime and Disorder

Regardless of whether the change in perception of disorder is based on evidence or not, there does seem to be a real change in perceptions about crime. Consider the Google trends data on searches for the term ‘crime’. The graphic below shows a pattern that is interesting in two ways. First, Google searches for ‘crime’ over the last twenty years shows that the average number of searches has increased in the last five years, from mid-40s to the low 50s. Note that this increase predates COVID.

But there is an even more intriguing pattern in the data. That is, the seasonality of searches for crime has noticeably flattened. In the 2004-2014 period there is a huge spike in Google searches for crime every August. This makes sense since crime spikes every summer. But by the COVID period, there is essentially no seasonal effect—the trend is relatively flat throughout. And that flattening of seasonal searches also long predates the COVID epidemic. This supports the idea that perceptions of crime have become somewhat untethered from the actual experience of crime. Regardless of whether crime is up or down, interest in crime is steady.

Merging the Narratives

The best way to look at these data is probably to just take them as they are and ask what they mean, without passion or prejudice. What does it mean that interest in crime is now steady throughout the year rather than seasonal? What does it mean that overall perceptions of the risk of crime have increased markedly in a time when the real risk of crime increased only a little? What does it mean that increasing stability (rather than instability) seems to have induced a greater fear of crime? And what are the consequences?

The last question holds the key. America is slowly getting older and richer and more stable. Among those three important shifts, one seems to be accelerating—the American population is aging more rapidly (the median age of Americans was 29.5 in 1960 and 38.8 in 2020—and 44.3 for white Americans in 2020). An August 2023 report from the Brookings Institution is titled, “New 2020 census data shows an aging America and wide racial gaps between generations” and the figure below from that report makes the trend clear.

Older, wealthier people are more risk averse. Since we began with the definition that disorder is an indicator of perceived risk, it stands to reason even if levels of disorder remain constant, the average American's tolerance for that disorder will decline. And with more resources at their disposal, they will respond. Individuals will buy more home security and they will buy more guns. Companies will buy more private security. And they will vote for politicians who vow to restore order. All of these things have happened.

There are two plausible responses to this trend. One is to educate people about their actual risk. And to educate them about the dangers of imposing order—about the communities and lives destroyed by mass incarceration, about the increases in police use of force that inevitably accompany order maintenance, about the increased role of surveillance in our lives, and the decline of autonomy and freedom that inevitably results.

The other is to acknowledge the inevitability of the march toward greater order and to find ways to do so humanely. The goal of reducing people’s fear of victimization can be reached through many mechanisms that have nothing to do with law enforcement or prisons. Indeed, there is a giant literature on prevention that applies public health models to improve lives and in doing so, to make our communities safer. These program and policy changes can be implemented without adding police or prison beds.

Accepting what is probably inevitable—that an older, richer America will demand less crime—should be the path to finally implement evidence-based programs that remove obstacles to the success of people and their communities and strengthen their assets. These answers are just waiting for a catalyst—and the catalyst is here.

Musical Interlude

Hey! Do you want to see the best bluegrass guitar player alive today cross-picking her way through the Rolling Stones She’s a Rainbow? You really, really do. Molly Tuttle is a national treasure. This is just my favorite thing today.

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[1] Identification is a critically important concept in social science research. It is a measure of the extent to which you have established a cause-and-effect relationship. A model is said to be identified if the cause and the effect are completely independent, except for the cause-and-effect relationship. This turns out to be way harder to achieve than it might first appear, and indeed most of the social science industry is built on trying to solve this problem. I would challenge social scientists in general and economists in particular (with respect to Charles Manski and his important and hugely influential book Identification for Prediction and Decision) to find another word to describe this measure of independence as identity and identification have evolved to have other contradictory meanings.

[2] Motor vehicle thefts increased substantially in this period, up 54%. But, a huge number of these thefts were confined to just two auto manufacturers—Kia and Hyundai—a fact which seems to be pretty widely understood and thus has ambiguous effects on overall crime-risk perceptions. The most common type of crime—larceny—declined in the 2019-2021 period (-3%).