The question isn't whether it is or isn't rising, but what voters consider acceptable. If voters find the current level of crime unacceptable, it doesn't matter what the broader trend is.
I personally find the concept of open air drug use, retail theft, and shit on the street unacceptable, I could care less what the numbers say and will vote based off of what I see with my own eyes. And whether or not that's "statistically sound", I could care less. Crime is decreasing? Okay, I guess it isn't decreasing quickly enough
Whose facts? Who do you trust and is it a source I do, too? What's included their data and what isn't? How recent is the data they're using?
If I go by the FBI a few months ago, crime is down. But the data is only up through 2022, so someone using another source will say the FBI info is inaccurate.
> Actual reality is still very much the question for a lot of people
Maybe those people don't realize that even science is our best understanding given current data. Or that our "truths" are often hazy statistical models. A sure recipe for falsehood is seeking simple answers.
What are you arguing? That we're can't know anything ever? That's not very useful in any kind of practical sense.
Figuring out what's going on from statistics isn't that hard if you understand how those statistics are being collected.
But they sure beat whatever you, a single person, happens to see with your own eyes. Your personal experience is an almost infinitesimally small random slice. It's just not statistically significant.
Statistics may always have error bars, but the errors bars around your personal sampling of one will always be incomparably larger.
No need to believe me when you could have spent this same amount of time just researching it for yourself. It's probably the first thing anyone talks about when they seriously discuss reducing crime rates.
tl;dr If you put enough people in prison for long enough, you will naturally reduce the crime rate because such a huge number of people are incarcerated. That doesn't justify things like life sentences for possession of marijuana.
But overall, you don't reduce an individual's likelihood to commit a crime either before or after their time in prison using longer sentences.
> Kind of hard to believe really, you think the Code of Hammurabi didn't work?
I personally find the concept of open air drug use, retail theft, and shit on the street unacceptable, I could care less what the numbers say and will vote based off of what I see with my own eyes. And whether or not that's "statistically sound", I could care less. Crime is decreasing? Okay, I guess it isn't decreasing quickly enough