Summary
In 2024, many U.S. cities reported historic declines in homicides and reductions in other violent crimes compared to 2023.
Cities like Philadelphia and Chicago saw notable drops, but some, such as Charlotte and Baton Rouge, experienced increases.
Despite these improvements, public perception of crime remains high, influenced by political rhetoric, media coverage, and local apps.
Experts note that gun violence disproportionately affects Black communities, impacting safety perceptions.
While intervention programs helped reduce violence, concentrated crime and rising shooting lethality continue to shape public unease.
That’s because local news endlessly amplifies whatever crime there is. Propaganda works.
That’s because local news is overwhelmingly Sinclair Broadcast Group
That, and there are so many homeless people, everywhere now, that people actually cannot avoid seeing them.
Do homeless people commit all the serious, violent crimes?
No, they’re more often victims than perpetrators.
But they are associated with unsafety, with social decay, with drug addiction, they are easy scape goats, and they often are not very pleasant to interact with, they smell bad (I’ve been homeless this is just a fact not an insult), they dress raggedly.
As with the constant drumbeat of sensational local crime stories, actually walking or driving around outside and seeing homeless people all the time just makes people feel less safe.
Everywhere is a ‘bad neighborhood’ now, therefore crime must be going up.
Perception of course often does not track with reality, and ‘common sense’ solutions often don’t work at all and make the problem worse, but the average American has a literacy level of a 6th grader, so it makes sense that in aggregate we constantly make easy and wrong assumptions.
I wonder if it has anything to do with a 24 corporate news cycle and social media that is designed to drive up viewership by sensationalizing every story and focusing on fear while either entirely ignoring or poorly representing actual problems in favor of whatever makes them more money with little to no regard for rigid fact checking or aggressively calling out lies when it is inconvenient.
You’re saying a nation of shitebag gun owning cowards feels unsafe and scared of their own shadows?
Is there a way to block inline images
