What readers got wrong and right in our quiz.
Cities can be like people in at least one respect — it can be tough to shake a bad reputation.
A recent New York Times quiz revealed some common misperceptions about crime trends, the most widely held of which involved Chicago. Readers were asked to rank Chicago nationally in murder rate. The options were first, third, fifth or seventh. Most picked “first,” and only 8 percent chose the right answer (seventh).
Chicago has struggled mightily to contain violence, but its reputation has probably also been shaped by portrayals in film and TV; news coverage; and political messaging.
Former President Donald J. Trump repeatedly criticized Chicago, saying it was “worse than Afghanistan.” And conservatives have long depicted Chicago as a crime capital. The reasons could include an opportunity to fault President Obama for not keeping his home city safe and to argue that gun restrictions are not able to stop violent crime. (Defenders of those restrictions point out that nearby states have lax gun regulations and thus undercut Chicago’s efforts.)
In general, Republicans have found big liberal cities inviting targets for criticism as part of racial politics.
New York also tends to be viewed as violent. It endured 2,245 murders in 1990, but by 2017, the number had fallen below 300. Readers fared a little better in assessing the trend in New York. Still, 44 percent did not know that its murder rate has been below the national average in recent years, including last year.
Nationwide, crime declined consistently for a quarter-century starting in the early 1990s. But for a large share of Americans, perceptions didn’t keep up with reality. In the quiz, only about four in 10 readers knew that the national murder rate last year was lower than the 1990 rate.
A Pew Research report in 2016 found that “voters are usually more likely to say crime is up than down, regardless of what official statistics show.” For decades, Gallup has asked people whether they think there is more or less crime in the U.S. compared with the year before. The question has been asked almost yearly since 1996, and every year except for 2001 the public — usually by overwhelming margins — has said crime has increased.
Some research shows that public demand drives coverage of bad news — that people have a “negativity bias,” a predisposition to focus on and remember negative information, possibly an evolutionary adaptation. In other words, people tend to be more interested in hearing about potential threats they can act upon, like an approaching hurricane, a new virus or a crime spree that has been reported nearby.
Why overall crime fell while murder increased
The rise in murder rate for 2020 is expected to be around 25 percent, the largest increase in U.S. history, in records dating to 1960. That equates to roughly 20,000 murders last year.
And yet overall crime went down, a fact that only 28 percent of readers knew. The F.B.I. will release its official figures in September, but the preliminary data from over 12,000 law enforcement agencies suggests it was probably one of the largest declines on record.
Property crime was down 7.9 percent in 2020 relative to 2019, according to this data. The national murder trend usually gets the headlines — for good reason — but property crime makes up around 85 percent of all major crimes reported by the F.B.I. Murder made up 0.2 percent of all major crimes reported by the F.B.I. in 2019, and even a historically large increase in murder would barely move the needle in terms of overall crime.
It’s not altogether surprising that overall crime would drop in 2020; it has fallen in 26 of the last 28 years, including each of the last 17 years. Since most crime is property crime, and since property crime can flourish when people need to be out and about — a shoplifter needs stores to be open, for example — nationwide quarantines and reduced mobility last year most likely contributed to reduced property crime pretty much everywhere.
The right answer on defunding
It has become common to blame falling police budgets for last year’s increase in murders. The National Fraternal Order of Police, the former N.Y.P.D. commissioner Bill Bratton and Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas have been among those making that connection.
Yet the available evidence — a comparison of changes in murder with changes in the operational budgets for police departments in 105 big cities (those with over 200,000 people) — suggests that budgetary changes were not a cause of last year’s murder increase.
Most of the cities increased their police budgets last year, with the budgets decreasing in just 37 of the 105. Places that reduced their police budget were about as likely to see a rise in murder as places that increased it. Murder was up in 31 of the 37 cities that lowered their police budgets (84 percent), while it was up in 54 of the 68 cities (79 percent) of cities that raised their police budgets.
It may seem as if the cuts in police budgets were in response to the defund movement. But the changes in budgets last year were relatively normal for times of economic distress. During the Great Recession, for example, between 19 percent and 47 percent of these 105 agencies reduced their budgets each year, according to census data compiled by PoliceScorecard.org.
It is certainly plausible that depressed police budgets, if sustained, could have an effect — some research shows that adding police officers can reduce murders and other serious crimes — but last year, at least, there did not appear to be any relationship between budget changes and increased murder.
Over 80 percent of readers correctly answered that there was no relationship, the highest accuracy rate for readers of any question in the quiz.
Jeff Asher is a crime analyst based in New Orleans and co-founder of AH Datalytics. You can follow him on Twitter at @Crimealytics. Data on quiz answers is based on responses as of June 10.
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