Is the Belief in Increasing Crime Rates Just Anchoring?

Crime Continues to Go Down

As you are probably aware, crime has been decreasing pretty much since we started tracking it.

Homcide is the favourite statistic because it’s the easiest to track. (Other crimes are open to different definitions and interpretations. Not homicide).

Here is the long-term historical trend in countries for which we have statistics for centuries:

Look at that! That’s a gigantic decrease!

And it continues to be true more recently, across the entire world:

So even relative to the low homicide rates of the 20th century, murders have continued to drop.

This trend applies to us in Canada, of course:

<a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/433674/homicide-rate-in-canada/?srsltid=AfmBOoquWSM9bqFK6uQ7fS-mnfhWcP_tH4ea9VGH1oLYW0lWXAw56Dgu" rel="nofollow"><img src="https://www.statista.com/graphic/1/433674/homicide-rate-in-canada.jpg" alt="Statistic: Homicide rate in Canada from 1983 to 2024 (per 100,000 residents) | Statista" style="width: 100%; height: auto !important; max-width:1000px;-ms-interpolation-mode: bicubic;"/></a><br />Find more statistics at <a href="https://www.statista.com" rel="nofollow">Statista</a>

Obviously we get so much media from the US. The US is infamously more violent than other countries with similar levels of wealth. And the story in the US for the last century isn’t as obviously clear as it is in Europe or Canada or Oceania, but homicides are still way down over the last 40 years:

But People Think Crime is Going Up

And yet, you are probably aware that many people think crime is going up. You probably know at least one person who believes this.

Here in Toronto, for example, we think crime is going up even though we continue to live in one of the safest cities of its size in the entire world:

This appears to be true pretty much everywhere. It’s especially glaring in the US, where crime has dropped more, relative to the recent past, than it has in other countries.

And yes, murder rates aren’t crime rates but, as I said before, murder rates are just easier to compare across time and space.

Why Do People Think Crime Is Going Up?

There are plenty of theories as to why murder specifically and crime more generally has gone down. I’m not particularly interested in comparing those here. I think there are some decent theories and less crazier theories.

I’m far more interested in why people seem to always believe crime is going up. (This is not a new phenomenon.)

I think there’s one really obvious reason but there’s likely a human predisposition to believe crime is going up that I don’t think gets talked about.

It’s the Media, Dummy

The obvious reason is our media, especially our 24/7 “news” media. “If it bleeds, it’s leads” remains true of visual media in particular. And we are inundated with more visuals than ever before in human history, because it’s not just legacy media any more.

Before radio, newspapers covered sensational crime first and didn’t really focus on good news. Hence “if it bleeds, it’s leads.”

Radio news certainly has a predisposition, due to its brief nature a few minutes every hour, to discuss “events” which often includes individual crimes.

We all know how talk radio obsesses over crime.

And TV news might have been similar to radio news, only more in-depth to start. But, since the 1980s, there’s been a need to fill up entire programming days with “news” which has led to a focus on very local or international crime in additional to national news stories.

The internet itself certainly didn’t make this obviously worse, but social media has. For every positive story that goes viral, how many negative stories go viral?

We are inundated from our established and “new” media with the idea that the world is getting worse. And a major part of that story is that crime seems to be happening all the time, because no matter where we live, we hear about crime. Unless we live in the largest of cities, that crime is almost always, happening somewhere else in our region or country, but it is always happening.

But I don’t just think it’s the increase in the supply of crime news that has caused this incorrect belief that crime is getting worse. I think it’s a huge part of it, and I wonder what a society without 24-hour news and social media would think about crime rates. But I do think there’s something innate in us that is probably causing most of us to continually believe crime is increasing.

Memory and Bias

Human memory is terrible. I think most of us don’t realize this but it is. If you disagree with me about this, I strongly suggest you go read any popular science book about memory or watch a YouTube video. We remember things incorrectly maybe even more often than we remember things correctly.

Unless we grew up in a particularly violent neighbourhood, I suspect the vast majority of us believe the world was less violent when we were kids. (How else to explain the belief that crime is getting worse?)

I think there are two really good reasons for this, which are intertwined:

• As kids, we usually have way fewer responsibilities and cares. One thing we don’t tend to care about is the outside world. The world of a child is small. It does not contain the entire world, the entire country, the entire region or even the entire city or town, usually. It’s jus their friends and family and their school and sports teams. Moreover, those of us who are older grew up before 24-hour news inundated us with hourly, or even minute-by-minute reports of all the crime happening in the world. When we were kids, crime was a story in the paper, or a story on the radio or TV, it wasn’t in all media all the time.

• But the second reason is that, for many of us, things were better as children due t to this very lack of responsibility. I don’t personally believe that about my childhood. I had a great childhood but I’ve been glad to be an adult since I turned 18. But I think a lot of people, if not most people, romanticize their childhoods. As a result, they romanticize the world they were children in. That world had fewer problems in general, and more nice things. It certainly had less crime. (You can see this romanticization every time an older person reminisces about something terrible on social media. For example, every Facebook post of anyone above a certain age romanticizing the food of the past, which was often canned. I’m not on Facebook any more but I used to see old people romanticizing terrible food all the time. The food of the past was not better! There was way less choice and so many families relied on their pantry rather than fresh food most of the time.)

But I don’t believe it’s just a fondness for childhood that is causing this mistaken belief.

Is it Anchoring?

It’s pretty obvious why we romanticize the past and why we might think that the past had less crime, when we were children and didn’t watch the news or didn’t read the paper or didn’t care about whether or not a murder or other crime happened.

But I think there’s a more fundamental bias that helps make this effect worse. That’s the anchoring effect.

Anchoring is when we use an often irrelevant reference point to make a guess about something.

What I think is happening with the polls about crime is that we are using our childhoods, or something else in the past, as the anchor for our guesses about whether or not crime is increasing. We think back to some distant time, we don’t remember being absolutely besieged by reports about crime - from social media, from the internet more broadly, from cable if we still have it, from radio in the car or at the doctor’s, from a newspaper if we still read one.

Instead we remember a world where there wasn’t true. And so crime has to be increasing. It has to be! Who cares what the statistics stay? I know what’s happening in my city/region/country.

Or is it Framing?

There’s another related biased heuristic we use to make judgments that might be a better explanation. In the framing effect, we use how information is framed to make a decision but that decision changes based on how the information is framed. So if a fact or set of facts is spun positively, many of us will view them positively whereas a negative framing might have made us view them negatively. Similarly, we might make a very different decision on what we should do with new information based on whether the framing context is positive, negative or apparently neutral.

There are multiple ways this relates to the perception of crime and one specific way in which anchoring and framing are intertwined.

First of all, I rarely if ever see anyone in the mainstream media talk about a crime in relation to the context of crime reducing. If they do say “This is only the 10th murder of the year” or whatever it is never the main thrust of the story. Crime is always negative, as there’s always a victim. But the context that crime is rarer is hardly ever stated which causes us to view crime as getting worse.

Related to anchoring, I wonder if something else is going on.

In internet marketing, framing is a neat trick to convince users to pick a price we want. So, for example, you have a low price, a high price and a medium price, which is the price we want the user to pick. We’re happy if the user picks any price, as that’s a sale, but the way to structure this to increase profitability is to make the least good price for the customer the middle price. There are numerous non-price examples as well.

What I’m wondering is, does framing combine with anchoring to create a world in which the present is the worst possible time?

Everyone seems to think their lives were better before 2020. That may be true for some but it’s hardly true for all. (I can tell you that, despite my current employment situation, my life is better today than it was in 2019. It’s not even close.) The pandemic acts as this weird anchor where people view things that happened before that as better than the recent past. (Look at what is happening in the US right now with a whole bunch of people deciding the former president was responsible for their bad feelings about the country so they re-elected the guy who was literally in power at the beginning of the pandemic. Anyway…) A minor increase in crime in many places during the pandemic makes this particularly relevant to people’s feelings that crime is increasing.

So I wonder if the pre-COVID past is acting as one part of the frame. Or it’s the anchor, if you prefer. And then the future which, for many if not all people, is full of hope. (Especially if those people think that a new/old politician will improve their lives.) But in the present we have constant reminders that crime is happening all the time. Wherever we look we are told there is crime. (You do not want to eat or drink with me in a restaurant or bar showing CP24. I will not stop complaining about them. There was a burglary in King City yesterday! Fuck! Everything is worse!)

It’s Not Just The Media

As much as I want to blame the media for this, I do think we’re also to blame. The way we view the world is, I believe, a major contributor to this widespread belief that we are constantly seeing crime increases.

Sure, fewer of us would believe this if we didn’t get so much coverage of irrelevant crime. (By irrelevant, I mean any crime that is not happening in a place we will be physically any time soon and which isn’t white collar. If someone breaks into a house seven towns over, this has no impact on your life. There’s no reason you need to know about this.)

But I think we have this combination of crappy memory and these weird heuristics which encourage us to believe that the crime we’re hearing about right now has to be worse than the crime we don’t remember hearing about in our childhood (or in 2019, when everything was sunshine and lollipops).

I’m not sure if this is correct. But I’d love if someone would try to test it.