The Media Keeps Claiming Crime Rates Are Falling.
They Lying, As Usual.

John Lott writes that the media and blue cities and the FBI are massaging stats in favor of The Regime.

Americans think crime is on the rise, but the media keep telling them they're wrong. A Gallup survey last year found that 92% of Republicans and 58% of Democrats thought crime was increasing. A February Rasmussen Reports survey found that 61% of likely voters say violent crime in the U.S. is getting worse, while only 13% think it's getting better. Journalists purport to refute this by citing official crime statistics showing a downward trend.

Americans aren't mistaken. News reports fail to take into account that many victims aren't reporting crimes to the police, especially since the pandemic.

The U.S. has two measures of crime. The Federal Bureau of Investigation's Uniform Crime Reporting program counts the number of crimes reported to police every year. The Bureau of Justice Statistics, in its National Crime Victimization Survey, asks some 240,000 people a year whether they have been victims of a crime. The two measures have diverged since 2020: The FBI has been reporting less crime, while more people say they have been victims.

The divergence is due to several reasons. In 2022, 31% of police departments nationwide, including Los Angeles and New York, didn't report crime data to the FBI. In addition, in cities from Baltimore to Nashville, Tenn., the FBI is undercounting crimes those jurisdictions reported.

Another reason crimes reported to the police are falling is that arrest rates are plummeting. If victims don't believe criminals will be caught and punished, they won't bother reporting them. According to the FBI, if you take the five years preceding Covid-19 (2015-19) and compare them with 2022, the percentage of violent crimes in all cities resulting in an arrest fell from 44% to 35%. Among cities with more than one million people (where violent crime disproportionately occurs), arrest rates over the same period plunged from 44% to 20%.

Arrests for property crimes dived even more sharply. FBI data show that in 2022, 12% of reported property crimes in all cities resulted in an arrest. In cities of more than one million people, only 4.5% of reported property crimes in 2022 resulted in an arrest.

Based on the National Crime Victimization Survey, only 42% of violent crimes, such as robberies or aggravated assaults, and 32% of property crimes, such as burglary or arson, were reported in 2022. While the Justice Department doesn't track the number of prosecutions, the percentage of arrests that resulted in a prosecution appears to have fallen that year as well.

The FBI decided to scrap its old system of collecting crime data at the exact same time the Democrats were enacting their disastrous "decarceration" schemes. This was guaranteed to produce a discontinuity in the data, since pre-2021 stats are recorded and categorized differently than post-2021 stats. Even if they were actually recording all crimes, Democrats would point to the inconsistency in data treatment to explain away any increases in crime.

Here's what's going on in the real world:

Fifty women have been randomly attacked by strangers so far this year in the lower half of Manhattan, an NYPD official said.

"The trend that I'm getting from the people that we're arresting, the majority of them are homeless, the majority of them seem like they need some kind of help with mental illness," Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny said at One Police Plaza Tuesday.

Most of the attacks don't appear to be copycats and cops don't consider them a trend, Kenny said.

But some of them have become high profile because of victims posting on social media, he said.

"This is no new phenomenon," Kenny said. "It's just being reported at a higher rate and getting a lot more publicity than it normally does because of social media . . . we welcome that. We want to encourage reporting so that we can make these arrests."

Out of the 50 female victims, 37 were attacked in the street and 13 in the transit system, he said.

Some were punched and others were struck with objects.

Arrests have been made in 14 of the attacks, he said.

All of the assailants appear to be black, homeless, and mentally ill. The exact sort of people the left was determined to release from jail and bail requirements in the name of "equity."

The left has an answer to this, of course. The problem isn't "decarceration" programs aimed at releasing dangerous repeat felons from jail.

The Real Criminals attacking women are MAGA dudebros being indoctrinated on anti-feminist 4chan boards.

Angry maniac femcel Amanda Marcotte:

Women report being assaulted by men of different races and ages. Still, across the different stories, a couple of similarities pop out: The alleged victims are mostly young and pretty, and most of them say they were minding their own business when they were attacked. Some were on their phones or reading on tablets. Others were speaking to friends or daydreaming. Whatever they were doing, they were just living their lives, and that, it seems, is what enraged their assailants.

The alleged victims are mostly young and pretty, and most of them say they were minding their own business when they were attacked.

Are there any points-in-common among the assailants, Amanda? I'm thinking about racial and Housing Status traits that might make your "this is all MAGA hatred of women" thesis less plausible.

Whatever the scale of this problem eventually turns out to be, it's not surprising that these stories have gone viral and captured the public's imagination.

1, the problem is decarceration, and that's obvious, which is why you're handwaving away the importance of the cause.

2, as usual, committed gnostic Marxists insist that crime isn't real, not really real anyway, and the only real crisis here is one occurring in "the public imagination."

While it rarely turns to violence, most women who spend much time walking around in public have experience with men who berate them for paying attention to something other than the man who is now, often out of nowhere, spewing invectives. In our modern era, that often manifests with men who are infuriated at women for looking at their phones. But I'm old enough to remember when I would get yelled at for reading books in public.

I grew up in a town where it was illegal to dance. True story, my word as a Kevin Bacon.

Whatever the excuse the angry man concocts, the impetus is always the same: The eyes of a woman are directed at someone or something that is not him, and he is indignant over it. So he will make sure she has no choice but to look at him, either by getting in her face or -- in these alarming New York cases -- punching her. If he cannot capture her adoring gaze, well, he will make her stare at him in fear.

So, nothing about the fact that these are obviously mentally-ill homeless men who are being mass-released from prison by your Marxist allies?

She's claiming this phenomenon is just due to the usual fascination of trivial "feminists" -- fucking Internet Drama. MAGA men are ruining my mentions on Twitter! Ugh! Something must be done!

These stories resonate, as well, because the nation is having a moment of increasingly unhinged male fury at women for daring to have lives that are centered around something other than catering to a man's every whim. Unleashed by Donald Trump and the MAGA movement, there's an upswell of loud male entitlement shouting at us from every corner.

The black homeless mentally-ill men playing the knockout game are all MAGA diehards, huh?

Now she's going to flashback to Internet Drama from fucking 2015:

We see it in the male fans of Jordan Peterson, who clamor to his events to hear him croak out a just-so story about how lobsters justify their faith in male dominance. Or the rise of "tradwives" online who make a living pretending they're unemployed and housebound.

Can she draw a line between black homeless mental patients playing the knockout game with women, and more Trivial Internet Drama about men not liking the feminist propaganda trifle Barbie?

Let's see:

Or Ben Shapiro setting fire to a Barbie doll because he can't stand that a blockbuster comedy starring a woman is about anything but her quest for male affection.

Let's connect it up with abortion -- really explore the studio space.

Or MAGA pundits telling lies about birth control, in hopes of tricking women into having babies before they're ready. Or conservatives writing op-eds that blame women for male loneliness, telling women they must self-sacrifice to relieve male pain by marrying Donald Trump voters. Or right-wing men yelling because Taylor Swift has cats or because she dates a hunky, vaccinated NFL player instead of, I dunno, having babies with a guy in ill-fitting cargo shorts.

I have to tell you, feminists tend to be among the ugliest, most out-of-shape, least alluring women on the fucking planet, but they're always complaining of the aggressive persistence of devoted and implacable Gentlemen Suiters vying for their (cold, asexual, femcel) affections.

These poor dishrag-dingy drulls are absolutely irresistible to men! They're just absolutely beset by unwanted male attention, 24/7/365!

This insane spin is of course being parrotted by all the lower-IQ FemPCs.

This is yet another example of the left pretending that all of society's ills are due to White Christian Straight Men. They can't castigate the black homeless men actually sucker-punching women because they're higher on the progressive stack, but they still have to Defend Wimmins and talk about the attacks, so they just pretend that MAGA is primarily a movement of the black, homeless, and mentally-ill.

This is like that stunt video of a woman walking down the street and being cat-called. Every man seen cat-calling her was black and Hispanic, but feminists pretended not to notice that and scolded White Incels about it for a year.

Or more recently, and more directly on-point: We watched the videos of mostly black (and some Hispanic) men sucker-punching Jews on the streets of New York, which Jake Tapper and other propagandists turned into a ritual denunciation of white MAGA voters and their antisemitism.

Semi-related: An obvious MAGA incel tells Columbia Administrators, at a disciplinary hearing, that they should excuse his crimes and just be grateful that he's "not murdering zionists."

posted by Disinformation Expert Ace at 03:20 PM

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