[glenra]

Nope! In recent decades the violent crime rate has dropped in the US faster than the population has increased so the total number of crimes is actually fewer today than it was in 1990, even as a raw non-population-adjusted number.

My own theory is that as bad events get rarer they cross some threshold that makes them become more newsworthy when they do happen, so that we hear about them more, and salience bias - the fact that examples quickly come to mind - make us think it's happening more. This applies as much to hurricanes and mass shootings and "hate crimes" and violent crime in general as it did to shark attacks in the mythic "summer of the shark". Once the media has an existing narrative they can hang a story on (eg "it's just like Columbine!") they find it easy to report more stories like that, until eventually we all get sick of that topic and move on to something else.

[mehrdadn]

I wasn't referring to the US as a whole, but just instances where I've seen this happen. Most recently it was just in the past few weeks right here on HN that someone said crime had risen in Seattle and someone else said it had fallen, and it turned out the discrepancy was due to population adjustment.

But I'd expect there's a fair bit of the effect you're saying too.