Here in Nashville, for example, we saw 67 murders in 2015, up from 41 last year. (The figures are for all of Davidson County). At first blush, that seems like an alarming increase. And it has caused much consternation among politicians, the media and community leaders, with lots of calls for “action,” whatever that means.
But last year was a historic low for the city and represented the floor of an overall 10-year decline. This year’s total of 67 murders only takes the city back where it was in 2009, and is right at about the 10-year average of 66. For comparison, between 1971 and 1989, annual murders in Davidson County usually numbered in the 80 and 90s, and never dipped below 67 — and that was with 20 to 25 percent less population than the county has today.
And these are just raw numbers. The ten-year drop since there were more than 90 murders in 2005 has taken place in one of the fastest-growing counties in the country. Raw crime figures can drop only so low, particularly in a city that’s growing by the day. And once they are at historic lows, even small increases look large when expressed as percentages.
Despite the likelihood that violent crime overall will be down slightly this year — continuing a general two-decade decline — a Gallup poll taken in October showed that 70 percent of Americans think crime is worse this year than last year. Just 18 percent thought crime has gone down. Crime in the United States has been dropping dramatically since about 1994. Yet with one exception, in every year since 1994 there has been at least a 20 percent gap between those two figures. The year 2012, for example, saw the lowest violent crime rate in the United States in 40 years. Yet by about a 50-point margin, Americans still told Gallup at the time they thought crime was getting worse.
Part of this is just due to the nature of news. Last night’s murder is news. A gradual, generation-long drop in murders may occasionally make headlines once we’re aware that it’s happening, but it won’t be in the news every day. Interestingly, Gallup also asks a question that tends to produce more accurate results — whether respondents feel unsafe walking alone at night in their own neighborhood. There, respondents today say by about a 2-1 margin that they feel safe where they live. That question also tracks more closely with the overall crime rate.
Unfortunately, public policy tends to be shaped by the less accurate question — how people believe things are trending outside of their immediate surroundings. Naturally, we rely on what we read and see on TV to form our opinions about what we haven’t experienced directly. And what we see on TV will naturally be the bad stuff that happened, not good news about the bad stuff that didn’t happen.
That’s why all this context is important: A murder will always be news. The people who didn’t get killed this year, but may have in a more violent era, obviously don’t make the news. People will always get a skewed reality that makes them feel less safe than they are, even in an era of unprecedented safety.
But when we do talk about statistics and trends, we could at least get them right. We can at least report the statistics not only accurately, but also with the background and explanation necessary to understand their significance. A report about, say, a 40 percent rise in homicides in a given city should always state if that increase comes off a record low, or a long decline. A report about the 39 police officers killed with guns this year might point out that it wasn’t long ago when four, five or six times that many were killed each year. And any reports about raw figures should always include rates.
We’re currently in the midst of a critical national discussion about criminal justice reform, police reform and mass incarceration. We’re finally reconsidering the rash policies that wrecked entire generations of some communities. The 1980s and early 1990s were an era of higher crime and a generally more dangerous society. But those debates were often based on myth, moral panic and political demagoguery. It’s one thing to give in to fear when crime really is on the rise. But it would be tragic if the opportunity we have today to reform laws was thwarted by same sort of fact-free fear.
