"The thing I have noticed is when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. There's something wrong with the way you are measuring it," - Jeff Bezos
That’s a pretty weird take to me. Crime stats and polling of people’s perception of crime show this as clearly the wrong approach for instance.
Most studies show that no matter what direction crime is going in, a substantial majority of people think their neighborhoods are safer and that everywhere else is basically a war zone that is getting worse. There’s a total disconnect locally/nationally in perception that is also detached from crime stats.
All of this is to say that the anecdotes are basically all but worthless in the case of understanding how bad crime is on any appreciable scale beyond a few blocks of one’s neighborhood.
>Crime stats and polling of people’s perception of crime show this as clearly the wrong approach for instance.
The only crime stat you can trust is murder and that's because bodies can't be hidden (easily).
Everything else gets swept under the rug.
When I wanted to report my car broken into I was hung up on three times because of a poor quality line, which was fine before I told them what I was calling for. When I went there in person I had to wait 40 minutes for someone to take my report and give me a reference number for my insurance.
This is actually a perfect example of Bezos being right on the money. You are measuring it wrong. The first and last articles focus only on violent crime, which is not what most people who are complaining about crime mean here. 538 is a little better, but their charts only go through 2019 before it became a major issue again. Only Vox seems to get it closer to correct (though still hung up on the violence thing):
> One theory that came up again and again is that city residents and visitors are, to some extent, conflating actual violent crime with broader indications of urban disorder.
If you are a leader like Bezos or a city politician you need to meet your customers / constituents where they are and fix the problems they want fixed whether or not it they are saying precisely what they mean. The anecdotes are right and the statistics are wrong.
It’s just a refutation of naive bias towards statistics, which is rampant in big organizations (see the McNamara fallacy). This is codified in the idea of being “data driven”, which is the right thing if your data is a true proxy for the thing you care about; in practice it often isn’t and you have to incorporate some more flimsy or subjective signal to better understand a problem.
It's probably related to how much or little we read about crime more than any true crime level. If we see 10 news articles everyday about crime, then we think there are a lot of crime around. If we read zero articles about crime, then it barely exists in our perception. What happens in reality does not affect our perception as much, as we probably seldomly see it for ourselves and when we see it, it would be difficult to objectively and statistically judge the crime level's direction with such few data points and biased experiences.
It's similar to Hans Rosling's comments about poverty in the 3rd world. It often sounds like poverty is increasing as time goes by, but if looking at statistics, overall poverty is decreasing and have been doing so for decades.
I dunno, it seems in line with most stereotypes being more true than false [1]. “Common sense” is often derided in online spaces like this, but when there hasn’t been a massive media / social effort to convince the population otherwise [2], it’s pretty reliable.
Taking a quick glance at the articles you linked shows the same behavior as those reporting on the economy - defining disingenuous targets so they can claim their headline is true. To tie this back to anecdotes, I think it comes down to trust. When my neighbor says they’re afraid to lose their job due to housing, food, childcare being a lot more expensive I dont see any motivated reasoning behind that statement. On the other end, economists (and all the articles you linked) have many incentives to distort the truth. On average anecdotes are going to come from a more truthful place - both because you trust the source and know their biases.
You're making the exact same mistake as the poster you're answering to warns about - you're mixing the objective reality ("absolute crime numbers") to percieved reality of population.
If the population percieves themselves unsafe and unhappy, your numbers don't really mean much to them because to restore happy society you need to look at *perception* and fix the reasoning behind it. Making the crime stats number go down won't do that by itself.
That's fair that perception is often wrong - but that's a different issue.
Perception is also in large part the very thing that matters when it comes to crime. That is, do I get to live in peace or in constant worry? Do I get my property priced "fairly" when I sell or dramatically underpriced because of this perception that the area is unsafe? To summarize, in what you describe "crime stats" are ignoring half or two thirds of the problem.
In San Francisco, "crime stats" are further muddied because of massive underreporting and cherry picking the definition. So called quality of life crime might be considered irrelevant because it rarely causes massive loss of property or injury. But it does make life extremely stressful for the locals (depending on the neighborhoods where it might be "tolerated" i.e. left rampant, or might not be tolerated.) In this case, "crime stats" deliberately not measuring anything very relevant.
See also recent discussion of the squatting issue in Spain.
Forgeties79|1 year ago
Most studies show that no matter what direction crime is going in, a substantial majority of people think their neighborhoods are safer and that everywhere else is basically a war zone that is getting worse. There’s a total disconnect locally/nationally in perception that is also detached from crime stats.
All of this is to say that the anecdotes are basically all but worthless in the case of understanding how bad crime is on any appreciable scale beyond a few blocks of one’s neighborhood.
* https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2016/11/16/voters-pe...
* https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/many-americans-are-conv...
* https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23663437/crime-violence-m...
* https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/show/as-concerns-grow-aroun...
llm_trw|1 year ago
The only crime stat you can trust is murder and that's because bodies can't be hidden (easily).
Everything else gets swept under the rug.
When I wanted to report my car broken into I was hung up on three times because of a poor quality line, which was fine before I told them what I was calling for. When I went there in person I had to wait 40 minutes for someone to take my report and give me a reference number for my insurance.
Crime is absolutely massively under reported.
fallingknife|1 year ago
> One theory that came up again and again is that city residents and visitors are, to some extent, conflating actual violent crime with broader indications of urban disorder.
If you are a leader like Bezos or a city politician you need to meet your customers / constituents where they are and fix the problems they want fixed whether or not it they are saying precisely what they mean. The anecdotes are right and the statistics are wrong.
dasil003|1 year ago
flakeoil|1 year ago
It's similar to Hans Rosling's comments about poverty in the 3rd world. It often sounds like poverty is increasing as time goes by, but if looking at statistics, overall poverty is decreasing and have been doing so for decades.
fjdidianabak|1 year ago
Taking a quick glance at the articles you linked shows the same behavior as those reporting on the economy - defining disingenuous targets so they can claim their headline is true. To tie this back to anecdotes, I think it comes down to trust. When my neighbor says they’re afraid to lose their job due to housing, food, childcare being a lot more expensive I dont see any motivated reasoning behind that statement. On the other end, economists (and all the articles you linked) have many incentives to distort the truth. On average anecdotes are going to come from a more truthful place - both because you trust the source and know their biases.
[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/insight-therapy/2018...
[2] https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/41556-americans-m...
izacus|1 year ago
If the population percieves themselves unsafe and unhappy, your numbers don't really mean much to them because to restore happy society you need to look at *perception* and fix the reasoning behind it. Making the crime stats number go down won't do that by itself.
creer|1 year ago
Perception is also in large part the very thing that matters when it comes to crime. That is, do I get to live in peace or in constant worry? Do I get my property priced "fairly" when I sell or dramatically underpriced because of this perception that the area is unsafe? To summarize, in what you describe "crime stats" are ignoring half or two thirds of the problem.
In San Francisco, "crime stats" are further muddied because of massive underreporting and cherry picking the definition. So called quality of life crime might be considered irrelevant because it rarely causes massive loss of property or injury. But it does make life extremely stressful for the locals (depending on the neighborhoods where it might be "tolerated" i.e. left rampant, or might not be tolerated.) In this case, "crime stats" deliberately not measuring anything very relevant.
See also recent discussion of the squatting issue in Spain.