The FBI’s latest trove of crime statistics show that crime rates fell nationally in 2022. If your response to that news is, “But it sure feels like crime keeps going up!” you are not alone. That’s because our entire debate about crime is held hostage to misleading ideas that prevent us from understanding what’s actually happening and making good policy choices.
And it just so happens that those ideas almost always push us in the misguided direction conservatives want us to go.
First, the most recent facts. Many types of crime increased in 2020. Crime rose all around the country when the pandemic hit — in places run by liberals and conservatives, in urban and rural areas alike. Then it began to fall in 2021, and the trend continued in 2022. “There’s no one answer” to explain the 2020 jump, says Jillian Snider, a lecturer at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, but key factors probably include the social disruption of the pandemic and the fallout around George Floyd’s murder, which increased distrust of the police and led to police in some localities withdrawing from enforcing the law.
Fox News practically turned itself into The Crime Channel, airing 193 segments about crime in the single week before the midterm elections.
Crime is a local phenomenon, but according to the FBI’s latest data, things have gotten better overall. Though robberies did rise 7.4 percent compared to 2021, homicides fell 6.1 percent, rapes declined 5.4 percent and aggravated assault ticked down 1.1 percent. Overall, violent crimes fell, returning to pre-pandemic levels. While property crime rose, that was largely due to a jump in thefts of motor vehicles (more specifically, Kias and Hyundais).
But that wasn’t what people were hearing in 2022. With the midterm elections approaching, the news media — especially the conservative media, but more mainstream outlets as well — became obsessed with the idea of a terrifying “crime wave” in progress. Fox News practically turned itself into The Crime Channel, airing 193 segments about crime in the single week before the midterm elections. The explanation was always the same: Progressive prosecutors’ soft-headed, liberal policies had produced an explosion in crime. Cities had devolved into hellscapes that now resembled something between “Death Wish” and “The Purge.”
In that context, facts became irrelevant. In a gubernatorial debate in Oklahoma, when Democrat Joy Hofmeister pointed out that the state has a higher violent crime rate than New York or California, incumbent Kevin Stitt could barely contain his laughter. “Hang on, Oklahomans, do you believe we have higher crime than New York or California?” Stitt said with a huge grin. “That’s what she just said!”
Stitt won re-election, but Hofmeister spoke the truth: Oklahoma has long had higher rates of violent crime than California or New York, even though it has also long been run by conservative Republicans. It’s not just Oklahoma. “The states that mostly have the highest rates of homicide are also the most red states,” Snider notes. “The ones with the highest incarcerated populations … consistently have very high crime rates.”
In many ways, the U.S. has already adopted the conservative approach to fighting crime. Americans have more guns than any other country, and we lock up more of our citizens per capita than any other country. If the conservatives were right, we’d be the safest society on earth. Yet despite recent declines in crime, we aren’t; our homicide rate, for instance, is higher than every one of our peer countries.
Instead, conservatives just push perceptions that don’t match up with reality, particularly when there’s a wave of attention on criminal justice reforms that assumes anything other than “tough” policies will inevitably make people unsafe. “If the community thinks there is no accountability,” because of the way potential reforms are discussed in the news, Snider told me, “the community themselves will just automatically assume crime is up even if it’s not.”
Our perceptions of crime don’t just come from our own experiences.
If you wanted to look on the bright side, you might say that the results of the 2022 election — in which Republicans fell far short of the victory they were expecting — showed that voters exercised some good sense and withstood the fear-mongering. But the crime debate hasn’t changed.
Consider one of our most pressing problems: the overdose crisis, which is killing over 100,000 Americans per year. Republicans present the wave of fentanyl overdoses as a function of the government’s relative degree of toughness: It’s happening because we aren’t tough enough (on both domestic criminals and immigration), and if we get tougher, the problem will be solved. No actual experts believe this. And people almost always think crime is increasing. In yearly Gallup polls from 1989 to 2019, a majority of Americans said they believed crime in the U.S. was higher than the year before in every year but two, despite the fact that the same period saw a steady, dramatic reduction in crime. That isn’t to say that feelings are irrelevant. If you’re afraid to walk down the street at night, that can have a profound effect on your quality of life whether your fears are exaggerated or not. Being a victim of crime can be terribly traumatic, and telling someone who was mugged that muggings are down in their city won’t make them feel any better. But our perceptions of crime don’t just come from our own experiences. They also come from what we’ve heard from people we know, the impressions that we believe are connected indirectly to crime (like seeing a lot of trash or graffiti), and of course, what we see in the media. In the 1970s, communication scholar George Gerbner developed the theory of Mean World Syndrome: that people watching endless crimes on television — in both fictional portrayals and the news — came to believe that the world was much more dangerous than it was. Studies since have confirmed Gerbner’s theory. Today, conservative outlets portray the world in the meanest possible terms, to keep their audiences in a state of fear and agitation while they push conservative policy solutions. Republican politicians do the same, and local television news — which has always taken the attitude of “If it bleeds, it leads” — reinforces that picture of the world. One lesson of these year-to-year changes ought to be that the small changes in crime policy — like which prosecutor is elected in a particular city — are far less important than more fundamental factors, including the fact that America is drowning in guns. Yes, it’s much harder to change those realities than to vote out one prosecutor or mayor in favor of another one. But a good first step is to keep the facts in mind. The next time you hear that we’re in the midst of a “crime wave” or that “crime keeps going up,” don’t believe it.
Paul Waldman is a journalist and author focused on politics and culture. 
