Did they make it go down for real it is or because they made the number go down through redefinition, reclassification and a "not worth your f-ing time to report it, peasant" posture?
Stats are so obviously untrustworthy these days. People who live there that I know say it's worse than it was in the late 2010s but better than it was during the early 2020s. But of course people who like the picture the numbers paint will say those are just anecdotes. IDK what to believe.
You can look into the reclassification fear of yours. Typically murders are used to compare. Meaning, 1 murder and 10 robberies. Next year 3 murders and 1 robbery. Some of pattern like this with the murder rate up or flat, but the crime down otherwise. Generally the point is that people will do a good job reporting murders (hard not to) and in the short term variance in the other crimes may have more to do with reporting characteristics.
One big divide is that people aren't talking about the same thing. Person A says they're less likely to die in location B. Great! Stats say violent crime is down! But there are a million pick pockets and I get robbed without a weapon every time I go downtown.
^alt SF version; every Tesla gets a window smashed.
Point being is two people can observe that and person 1 celebrate the lack of murders and person 2 flummoxed how come no one cares about the kids running out of Target with a T.V or the petty crime.
> The Metropolitan Police Department confirmed Michael Pulliam was placed on paid administrative leave in mid-May. That happened just a week after Pulliam filed an equal employment opportunity complaint against an assistant chief and the police union accused the department of deliberately falsifying crime data, according to three law enforcement sources familiar with the complaint.
> Union officials said there is a larger trend of manipulating crime statistics.[1]
Crime stats do indeed have the obvious problem that when crime is pervasive people stop reporting because reporting just exacerbates the harm of the crime by wasting your time.
One way to deal with this is to look only at murder stats, as there is a lot less reporting optionality there.
Unfortunately, that method is biased by changes the ratio of murders to other crimes. And particularly when the hypothesis is that there is rampant lawlessness and property crime as a result of law enforcement and prosecutors failing to enforce against those less severe crimes, a divergence between murder and other crimes is almost inevitable (unless the failure to arrest and prosecute also extends to murder...).
Of course they're corrupt and abusive. But that's fairly tangential to crime rates unless they take it to an extreme.
I think we ought to walk backwards from your question a bit. Is the position that the police are corrupt and abusive something that I'm supposed to disagree with? Is it supposed to be something obviously untrue (hint: it's not)?
Did they make it go down for real it is or because they made the number go down through redefinition, reclassification and a "not worth your f-ing time to report it, peasant" posture?
Stats are so obviously untrustworthy these days. People who live there that I know say it's worse than it was in the late 2010s but better than it was during the early 2020s. But of course people who like the picture the numbers paint will say those are just anecdotes. IDK what to believe.