Newspapers inevitably use FBI stats, which use varying methodologies and somehow always come out a little scarier. Going by the FBI, violent crime fell 49 percent between 1993 and 2017. By the BJS, violent crime fell 74 percent during the same period. But the public doesn’t believe it. There have been twenty-two Gallup surveys asking about violent crime since 1993. In eighteen of them, Americans believed crime was rising. Significantly, the numbers change if you ask people about crime in their neighborhoods, where most people see flat or declining dangers. Thus the typical belief system of an
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