That’s been decreasing the past few years! But it has been a big jump over a decade or two earlier. (I suspect it’s also less than it was in the 1980s.)
How accurate are the statistics actually? The 1930s seems like it was actually a fairly violent era by modern standards, the main difference being that the violence was between acquaintances - organized crime, bar fights, neighbor-on-neighbor, domestic abuse - rather than stranger on stranger. I’m not sure things were actually better managed nationally at all. Communities had more leeway to do internal policing and people generally lived in tighter quarters and knew each other. A lot of violent crime simply wasn’t reported because in most communities you wouldn’t involve the cops involved in an altercation between familiars. Plus the lynchings of course.
A body with a hole in it or a hole with a body in it demands bureaucratic attention.
The stats suggest that America got a lot less murderous over the course of the 1930s, although the great murder movies like "The Maltese Falcon" and "Double Indemnity" based on 1930s novels weren't filmed until the early 1940s.
And if you go by those novels, police in the big Californian cities were absolutely rotten with corruption, plus casual racism might mean under-reporting of murders, e.g. "Farewell My Lovely" where Nulty, the detective assigned to the murders by Moose Malloy of the black manager of the former night club complains bitterly that this is nothing, he has no chance of publicity from it (and so building his career), and Chandler hints this is in part because Nulty is honest so has no pull in the department:
"A man named Nulty got the case, a lean-jawed sourpuss with long yellow hands which he kept folded over his kneecaps most of the time he talked to me. He was a detective-lieutenant attached to the 77th Street Division and we talked in a bare room with two small desks against opposite walls and room to move between them, if two people didn't try it at once. Dirty brown linoleum covered the floor and the smell of old cigar butts hung in the air. Nulty's shirt was frayed and his coat sleeves had been turned in at the cuffs. He looked poor enough to be honest, but he didn't look like a man who could deal with Moose Malloy.
He lit half of a cigar and threw the match on the floor, where a lot of company was waiting for it. His voice said bitterly:
"Shines. Another shine killing. That's what I rate after eighteen years in this man's police department. No pix, no space, not even four lines in the want-ad section."
I didn't say anything. He picked my card up and read it again and threw it down.
...Nulty spit in the wastebasket again. "I'll get him," he said, "about the time I get my third set of teeth. How many guys is put on it? One. Listen, you know why? No space. One time there was five smokes carved Harlem sunsets on each other down on East Eighty-four. One of them was cold already. There was blood on the furniture, blood on the walls, blood even on the ceiling. I go down and outside the house a guy that works on the Chronicle, a newshawk, is coming off the porch and getting into his car. He makes a face at us and says, 'Aw, hell, shines,' and gets in his heap and goes away. Don't even go in the house."
A number of police departments got a lot more professional and less corrupt after WWII. Veterans who had seen combat came home with a chip on their shoulders against the cops who'd managed to sit out the war and stay home, collecting bribes. Tolkien's "Scouring of the Shire" about war veterans hobbits cleaning up the shire after WWI was re-enacted by American vets in places like Santa Monica, CA.
The LAPD hired a Marine general, William Parker, to clean up the LAPD from the top down. Parker created the famous serious, professional, honest, unfriendly LAPD of the postwar era that wound up having novel problems of its own.
That's when the CDC makes it convenient to start counting homicides by race/ethnicity: Hispanics aren't broken out before 1999.
Starting in the bureaucratically arbitrary randmo year of 1999 is actually more realistic than the usual journalistic process, which is starting at the peak of the Crack Wars in 1991 and then claiming murders are down, Down, DOWN!
The CDC has data from 1968-1998 but without breaking out Hispanics.
Then it has data from 1999-2020 with minor methodological differences compared to 2018-2024, notably that Asian and Pacific Islander are lumped together. But that's not a big deal in Cook County homicide counts.
Reporter Sam Quinones has written a couple of books about crime and drugs. He points out that law enforcement in Southern California got much more adept at fighting criminal gangs in the early 21st Century by using RICO to round up entire gangs, not just their kingpins, at once and sending them off to federal prisons far away from which they couldn't use their girlfriends as couriers.
But ... around 2015 fentanyl arrived, and, Quinones theorizes, a newer or revitalized form of meth, which inspired a huge wave of homelessness, wrecking downtown Los Angeles's chance to improve.
These drugs emerged about the same time as the anti-police Ferguson Effect.
Can you elaborate about the newer form of meth? I have not heard anything about that and I consider myself plugged into homeless and drug trends due to my medical job.
Quinones argues that between 2010-2015 as Mexico cracked down hard on the import of precursor chemicals for the ephedrine based meth production, the manufacturers switched to P2P meth (which is what Walter white switched to in breaking bad when they couldn't smurf sufficient pseudophed). He believes that p2p meth is uniquely psychosis inducing and shortens the time from addiction to crazed street person dramatically.
I found his book The Least of Us very insightful about both the meth and fentanyl epidemics.
This doesn't make any sense because meth psychosis is caused by severe sleep deprivation plus amphetamine induced mania.
If you soberly go days without sleeping, you will feel somewhat paranoid and irrational. The combine that with drug induced mania and it's a recipe for psychosis. But every user is being deprived of sleep at the same rate, whatever kind of amphetamine they are taking.
Conversely, if you have been getting plenty of sleep, you aren't going to have psychosis the first day you use, no matter what kind of amphetamine you're on. Because amphetamines are not hallucinogens. Of course, I'm speaking of generalities in this comment and there are exceptions that prove the rule.
Meth manufactured from p2p is chemically different: racemic rather than right-handed, and it tends to have different impurities than pseudoephedrine-derived meth. So it probably has somewhat different effects. Without knowing the details myself, it's totally plausible that it could be worse for mania, sleep deprivation, and addiction.
Your conclusions are perfectly logical, but the premises are off. Putting aside the issue of deliberate adulteration with fentanyl, chemical impurities are almost entirely irrelevant to the social problem of meth use. If all meth was 100 percent pure product from a high grade professional laboratory, this would change almost nothing "on the ground."
I agree the purity doesn't matter much--people will adjust their dose. I don't know a lot about the impurities involved, but different isomers can make a big difference--they'll give different ratios of effects and side effects, different rates of tolerance and dependence. I don't know whether or not it's a big factor in changing usage patterns, but for the same amount of getting high, you'll face a different profile of harms.
I'm open to arguments suggesting otherwise, but at face value I find it implausible that racemic ratios or impurities could have any effect on meth psychosis large enough to be observable on a population level.
I have gone days without sleeping, and paranoia and irrationality don't seem to be my symptoms. Can you cite some studies on this? I've had it from sleep researchers that symptoms can vary wildly...
I've been using amphetamines on and off for 20 years and I have spent a lot of time reading about amphetamines to understand my situation. Paranoia is on a spectrum and I would be surprised if you don't feel a bit “jumpy” or nervous after days of not sleeping. Or IOW, slightly paranoid. That would be extraordinary, but it is possible you are a uniquely confident and non-nervous person. But you don't have to take my word for it, I'll get back to you later with that data.
I'm pretty tuned in to the world of drug users and there's "no new or revitalized form of meth." I think the "wave of homelessness" was a combination of rising housing costs and a new systemic tolerance for visible homelessness.
Methamphetamine is almost certainly not found in nature. So it is probably by definition synthetic. One lone scientific paper claims to have found methamphetamine in an obscure plant but the response from other researchers was incredulous. See your favorite AI chatbot for more details.
Scott, does shoplifting data for stores that close because there was so much shoplifting get counted in the shoplifting survey? Is there any data on anti-shoplifting measures in drug stores or similar? I think shoplifting escalated from "I need an employee to open a plastic case to buy a video game" to "I need an employee to open a plastic case to buy almost anything". I try to not go to stores anymore, but this would be a sharply felt impact for everyday people.
Retailers include shoplifting within a large category called “shrink.” This category also includes employee theft, inventory mismanagement and accounting errors. Shoplifting is likely *most* of shrink, but by no means all.
Shoplifting is also a convenient thing for a retailer to blame when it has to close an underperforming store.
I worked in shrink reduction for ten years (2006-2016). I can assure you that employee theft is by far the largest part of the shrink. Shoplifting is distant second, sometimes third.
Yep. If shoplifter behavior changes such that, without response, shoplifting would double but stores respond in a way that annoy customers and keeps the increase in shoplifting to sub 20% we'd see the evidence in question.
> I think shoplifting escalated from "I need an employee to open a plastic case to buy a video game" to "I need an employee to open a plastic case to buy almost anything".
Isn’t this describing shoplifting *prevention* escalation, rather than shoplifting escalation? Perhaps the one is a response to the other, but is there evidence for that? Are there other hypotheses, such as capitalist efficiency hunting becoming less and less tolerant of the same level of shrink? Has anyone asked stores why they have increased plastic case use or tried to measure it compared to shoplifting data?
To use an analogy, car accident prevention measures have escalated dramatically - new cars have lots of sensors and automatic braking etc - but that by itself is not evidence that car accidents have escalated, but rather that we tolerate it less as tech is improving. (Not saying these are comparable, more of an intuition pump to think about what evidence we should look for)
The most straightforward method I would employ to find out is to run a study where we ask retail business owners how much "shrink" they've experienced over the past ten years or so. Esp. larger retailers such as 7-Eleven, CVS, WalMart, Target, etc. They will doubtless have this recorded somewhere. It might even be possible to ask their insurers, but that's assuming this type of loss is widely insured and reported. (This information query might also be refused for security reasons.)
A retailer that suddenly invests more in theftproofing ought to be able to easily tell whether that was driven by a spate of theft or by some board member trying to pad his resume.
Yes, I think what happened a lot in those cases is stores realized (correctly) that after looking at *marginal changes* to purchase patterns of certain items that it made more sense than was previously thought to lock items under key. This has made the perception of shoplifting much greater because *fear of shoplifting* increased. (In reality the fear should have been higher back in 2003 but companies didn't realize that nearly as well as they do today with better loss prevention understanding.)
There has been a large increase in loss prevention in recent times which shows in a decrease in shoplifting but also a large increase in the *perception* of shoplifting.
Personally, while I've experienced some increase in barriers to buying things, these seem to be the result of safetyism rather than shoplifting prevention. The only literal plastic cases I've seen added to local stores was for laundry detergent around the time the "tide pod challenge" stories were going viral, and the only other new barriers I've noticed have been needing ID to buy certain OTC drugs.
I like graffiti, even the super banal ugly ones, though I'm still morally against it as the fact that I like them doesn't override the fact that they're by definition asserting your own wishes on public property or private property that isn't yours.
As for why I like them, I feel like it brings a lot of life into the city. They're like mini human stories that you catch while walking around, even the stupid ones like "<name>, I love you so much" or "<rival football club> are all stupid crayon eaters". The ones that are a bit insane, stupid, or funny(or all 3) and are left up for long enough eventually become local knowledge and even get quoted occasionally. And as that other commenter said when all you have to look at are the most boring gray concrete blocks the human touch of graffiti, even really stupid ones that say almost nothing, can make it more visually interesting.
I was also super fascinated with the graffiti remains in Pompeii(you should definitely read them if you haven't) .
Most of the graffiti in areas I'm familiar with doesn't contain coherent messages, at least not to anyone not involved in making it. This might vary by subculture; I've seen some places where this seemed not to be the case.
My feelings on the aesthetics of graffiti vary individually on a piece by piece basis, but my feelings overall tend towards strongly negative, because as the amount of graffiti in a place increases, the chance that some of it will be visually dissonant or uncohesive with the surroundings increases. Some graffiti might be visually well-composed and well-placed by skilled artists, but as more people contribute graffiti in an uncoordinated manner, it becomes almost certain that some of it will clash, both with the other graffiti and the surroundings, which spoils any positive visual effect the rest might have had as well.
I think it's also down to how much graffiti is normalised in your area. I'm from Eastern Europe and it's pretty common and is generally not a signifier of crime or decay. The cities in eastern europe are some of the safest in the world(when they're not an active warzone) so there's no harsh reaction to graffiti. Some people like them, some people dislike them and think they're ugly, but it's still ultimately about aesthetics and not about signalling potential danger and lawlessness.
And yes, it helps that most of it is somewhat? coherent. It's words on an aged facade that usually form complete sentences that sometimes make sense(but many of the famous ones that became local knowledge did so because they absolutely do not make sense so people argued over what the author wanted to say).
Equally inane graffiti left on Egyptian ruins by Hellenistic tourists are now part of the archeological record themselves -- who knows whether the archeologists if the 4th millennium won't be thankful of the ones on our subway cars?
This is why I try to incorporate information that would be useful to future historians in my graffiti. "HEDONiC 2026 / CITY POP. 800k / PAPERCLIP COUNT APPROX. 10M (CHATGPT 5.2) / MUSK IS FLESH / GROK IS CODE / ALCOR ID 644021 PLZ REVIVE IF WORLD IS OK THANKS".
The reason that it is hard to come up with a rational argument against is that there is a common conflation of graffiti with vandalism. But, the Mona Lisa painted on my car without my consent is vandalism, no matter its artistic merit. And, art in graffiti style painted on the side of a building with the owner's permission is, in general, more aesthetically pleasing than a blank wall. And, I would rather see one of these trains roll into a subway station than one that is graffiti-free (I am speaking of the exterior, not the interior) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bwzZPrNyjM
The average person doesn't want graffiti, which means that wealthier neighborhoods that can afford policing and have fewer lawbreaking kids will have less of it, which means that graffiti becomes a sign of disorder, which means that being around graffiti will make people feel less safe, meaning that wealthier neighborhoods will invest even more into preventing graffiti and the disparity grows in a feedback loop.
Same sort of feedback loop applies to the boomboxes, though boomboxes are a more widely agreed-upon-to-be-aggravating irritant.
This might explain the opposite situation in eastern europe then. Everyone is kinda poor and the government is not going to bother removing graffiti unless it contains some sort of anti-socialist message. So the only clean places are the super high-end neighborhoods where all the party elites live. And if you're an average citizen you don't want to go there because the secret police will arrest you for suspicious behavior so if you see buildings that are unusually clean you should get out as soon as possible. The 2nd part doesn't really hold after the fall of socialism but most people never developed an association between graffiti and crime so they're not as bothered by it even if they think it's ugly.
Graffiti looks like a sign of weak property rights enforcement. Whether that reflects a genuine decline in how much people can get the state to back up their property rights, I can't say though. That's a potential other avenue of argument though.
You're going to hate me even more, I like modern architecture AND I like graffiti. No wonder why I seem so much happier in modern society than the rest of you.
So if you built yourself a Minecraft-looking dwelling, which is what passes for affordable modernism in America now, and somebody scrawled MAGA on it - you would just … leave it?
The rational argument against is to point out the difference between process and outcome. Just because he happens to like the graffiti mural that he walks by every day doesn't mean that general tolerance for graffiti is a net social positive. Just because the local gang murdered your sister's rapists after the DA failed to bring a case doesn't mean that gang violence should be condoned.
If he likes public art then fine: lobby the city council to commission some public art, or go into the local supermarket and convince them to let him paint their outside wall. The sane solution to drab cityscapes is definitely not "let anyone spray paint whatever they want wherever they want."
I apologise for bringing in politics, but I think this is a relevant component to your argument.
Your concept of "lobby the local government to commission some public art" places said government in a position which we need to seek permission from in order to have our environment in a way which we collectively want (if the populace generally doesn't want it, then we have other problems and the government still isn't terribly relevant). We can imagine scenarios - because they're hardly uncommon - where the populace would like public art, or enjoy having a graffiti culture, but the local council is being twerps on the topic because "something something tough on crime something". Similarly, we can imagine - because again, they're hardly uncommon - where the populace doesn't want graffiti, but the local government is unable/unwilling to do anything, placing the burden on private businesses or individuals to clean it off, only to have it reappear soon after.
Even if you can get these two to line up (plausible), then you've got issues on getting the kind of art the council approves of, rather than the populace. The local government in my area definitely has aesthetic tastes which are very opposed to mine and I would argue most people in the area. This is an absolute nightmare to resolve working through "the system", but comparatively easy to do if working directly.
My point is that your "lobby the local council" plan seems to involve a lot of unnecessary steps, cost, bureaucracy, uncertainty and delay, and it's not at all unreasonable for people to choose a different path, even if that path is also quite imperfect.
Yeah I'm not a huge fan of bureaucracy either but enforceable property rights is the way society had decided to handle preference conflicts and if something is public property then the way we deal with it is through a political process. I'd rather deal with the Mayor's bad tastes than the local gang member's. At least the Mayor has some plausible claim to represent a majority of the community.
>The local government in my area definitely has aesthetic tastes which are very opposed to mine and I would argue most people in the area.
What if you like my tastes even less and I'm the one who tags the local public building? There's just no perfect solution to problems like this. In my view representative democracy is the least bad. If most people in your area really agree with you then go door-to-door and organize some grassroots action. If you get a bunch of people to sign onto "here's an artist we all like, please let him paint this wall" and present it persuasively at a city council meeting then they might listen to you.
My favorite streetscape art is a mural on the side of a gas station near the lake, depicting said gas station. I think that’s fabulous. Required neither government nor miscreants.
My long comment got deleted, but the short version is that I am a big fan of graffiti because like 40% sucks, but is a small thing, and is always getting replaced by more graffiti artists; 30% is fine/boring/I don't care, and 30% is a net positive, with like 10% of that 30% being absolutely fantastic and awesome.
What would you think of a city which had a system deliberately set up to streamline the process of properly negotiating permission for ad hoc art projects? Take a cell phone picture of a random wall plus digital sketch of the proposed decoration, geolocation data gets cross-referenced with real estate records to figure out who owns that structure or otherwise has a formal interest in its appearance, AI agents of the various parties concerned haggle on behalf of their respective humans' aesthetic (or political, etc.) agendas, artist gets a clear answer (approve, deny, conditional concerns, whatever) within minutes rather than the muse being held back by weeks of bureaucracy.
It seems... uh... like, there is no way a graffiti artist would be interested in doing this, no? Half the point is the transgression if I understand correctly.
Almost by definition, though, we're not seeing what more law-abiding types would prefer to add to such surfaces. The civil engineer designing a highway overpass, and the artist with a can of paint and a vision, have too few friends in common, and their respective budgets are too tight to casually reach out.
I mean, I do not know the history of that piece, but generally such things are done either a) on abandoned buildings, which are sometimes then re-inhabited, and often these re-inhabitants will keep the art (especially if they are trying to make some sort of 'cool' business; or b) done by a graffiti artist with the permission of and sometimes for payment by the building owner; I call them graffiti because this is what people call them / they come up if you google 'graffiti', although I could see wanting to make a distinction there.
I do think a) is properly graffiti, though it is probably less transgressive to modify unused property/unmaintained property (with owner's consent or not, rats & elements are modifying the hell out of it in ways much more expensive than painting a wall).
Depends on the graffiti. I’ve no patience for the ones that just tag their name and/or slurs everywhere, but occasionally street art can actually be good. I would not object to murals on what would otherwise be blank featureless fencing becoming more normalised. In parts of the world they do this, and the streets that have them are more pleasant for it than the ones with blank featureless walls.
I guess a thing that’s consistently happening here is buy-in from all involved: the wall owner is up for it, whatever entity organises the local youth does some minimal vetting for skill etc etc. It’s not a signal of disorder: these places are demonstrably capable of getting walls painted over, they’ve deliberately chosen to channel the graffiti energy to these specific walls instead.
What would you think of a city setting up a system to streamline the process of properly negotiating permission for such art projects? Take a cell phone picture of a random wall plus digital sketch of the proposed decoration, geolocation data gets instantly cross-referenced with real estate records, etc.
FWIW I think both of those examples are ugly and think they're aesthetically no different than having a country road plastered with tacky billboards. I would much rather have the unadorned brick walls.
Maybe the from-on-high graffiti sanctification is why anti-billboard campaigns are another thing that the past could consider and mount and have occasional success with; and we *cannot*.
Could you elaborate on this? I don't understand what you're proposing, but I would have presumed the reason anti-billboard campaigns nowadays don't get traction is primarily because the advertisers have more political influence than the general population.
You have to have a society in which such a campaign is not dismissed as an unimportant “aesthetic” matter, as with litter; not a priority at all compared to the ongoing project of making what is low, high. And of course, the obvious point that if all surfaces being covered with graffiti is desirable, even the “aesthetic” argument has been undermined. And of course, if you change the structure of society, you lose the people who both cared about it and were in a position to do so with some effectiveness.
Who benefited from such campaigns? Everyone of course, unless the dystopian is the goal.
I like graffiti that's actual artwork, I don't like taggers. Except for Tox (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tox_(graffiti_artist) ), whose work is incredibly simple and samey (just "Tox" followed by the year), but who impresses with his sheer work ethic.
Everybody does. And guys with funny no sequiturs. Love that. Unfortunately, that's not 99 percent of graffiti. The average man's experience of graffiti is investing your heart and soul in a business and coming back the next day to see it covered by senseless bullshit somebody sprayed during five weed-fueled minutes.
So, the point is the city should pay for it, and provide minimal vetting (it helps if you have tons of abandoned buildings, so you're putting up plywood over glass windows).
Get rid of advertising first before whining about graffiti. "I don't want to see it and shouldn't have" is a valid argument but it applies 10x as much to ads than to graffiti because the relationship is adversarial there. If capital gets to force visuals down your eyesockets then so should the common man.
> People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
> You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
> Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
> You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
One cent (mostly payable to the recipient, but 10% could go to enforcement) per unsolicited e-mail or phone call, and a tax of one tenth of a cent per pageview on targeted online advertising - each frame of any autoplaying video counted separately.
Far easier to legally justify (and harder to evade) than an outright ban. Reduced noise would give any remaining ads more credibility and reach, so marketing departments still get to pull their weight. Less trade volume hurts middlemen (notably google) but, eh... if they're providing a service that everyone hates, that's just democracy in action.
This. I find the prevalence of advertising in the modern world to be far, far more unpleasant that graffiti. I think a lot of it has to do with motives. Graffiti is effectively neutral; it's generally not about me at all. Advertisement is not neutral: it's targeting me and trying to part me from my money. I can largely just ignore either one, of course, but advertisers have much more incentive to keep trying and to make themselves hard to ignore.
That's a rare case of graffiti targeted to make life better for middle-class white people like myself, but some of the more common stuff is at least more aesthetically pleasing than a bare concrete wall and I'm open to the possibility that it communicates something useful to its intended audience.
I don't think it's accurate to characterize that as graffiti. Neither the intent nor the effect were expressive. It's more like vigilante civic maintenance.
It expressed a very useful piece of information, But so does a scrawl that is properly understood to mean "This is Gang X's territory". Both are important data necessary to avoid potentially dangerous navigational errors.
Austin has a Bowie Street, of course, because he is one of the Heroes.
I was amazed at the swiftness, practically the morning after David Bowie’s death, that a fairly credible replacement had gone up - “David Bowie St.” The city let it stay up awhile.
I remember one day some lady friends and I arrived at a nature preserve, part of the NWR, at the edge of town. It was an excursion led by REI and I guess my friend was a member. So she signed up for this little field trip, it was like being in school again.
The restroom at the trail head - a limestone structure - was completely covered over with spray painted profanities. Like it had been gift wrapped in scrawled obscenities of all manner. The REI lady got on the horn and called the refuge manager.
When we returned from our hike, a refuge staffer was halfway through scrubbing off the paint. (I remember making a note of what he used, which worked with a great deal of elbow grease, but I’ve forgotten.)
This was his morning, in a place where there was certainly no shortage of tasks, and those actually related to the mission.
People who profess to love graffiti as the ultimate expression, after tattoos, of their own radical chic identity - are wholly responsible for this mundane and maddening occurence.
And, incidentally, for the guy who paints “F*** Biden” on his own garage door, thereby making the houses of everybody around him harder to sell.
Apples to oranges. If I don't like a piece of graffiti, I can generally just not look at it. Even if it were, say, on a route I used to commute every day, my interaction with it would be extremely brief unless I stopped to stare.
The obnoxious thing about boomboxes (and other sources of loud noise) is that they force you to perceive them for an extended period of time, as long as you are in the vicinity. Oftentimes they do this even if you're in your own home and the boombox player is not. They can prevent sleep, increase stress, interrupt meetings and conversations...the harms are small, but potentially very numerous.
I'm generally not very sympathetic to people's complaints about "public disorder." But noise complaints are more likely to have real teeth, because noise is much better at crossing the boundaries into private spaces than almost any other sort.
from a graffiti artist i talked to last year: public facing walls are public property and anyone should paint on them whatever they want. Also murals-painters are kinda dicks for claiming large spaces for themselves.
What percentage of your paying subscribers live in the San Francisco Bay area?
The Bay Area is incredibly rich, but it lacks the amenities and order of comparable locations like Monte Carlo. There has been exactly one murder in Monaco in recent decades, an Agatha Christie-worthy murder of a a zillionaire by his servants.
The latest mayor of San Francisco seems to be doing a decent job of helping San Francisco live up to its potential.
Yeah, I really feel like this is city dependent. I’ve moved around a lot and have acquaintances in a lot of places, and all the ones complaining about crime and disorder are in San Francisco and DC. Everyone in Mid-Sized cities seem relieved that we are past the BLM crime spike.
It's hardly unreasonable for residents of humongously wealthy cities like SF and DC to complain about crime, while it's hardly unreasonable for residents of moderately wealthy cities to be relieved that crime isn't as bad as it was a half decade ago.
And yet, the DC residents didn't complain, much, when the crime was bad. They just got private security. What you see now is the hoi polloi saying "we were promised great cities! And Beer! And Free GaY Sex!" (okay, so maybe that's more DC than SF).
DC apparently lacks the armed private security of years ago. You know, back when there was open drug use a block or two from the capital? And tripwires in rock creek park?
I continue to hear a lot about the crime spike we've still got going here in my Mid-Sized city, and I heard a lot (pre covid) about the crime spikes (drug related) in small west virginian towns.
I'm reminded of the loud NY journalists hypotheses in vibecession article. Maybe somewhere around those journalists (or modernly, influencers) are getting very bad?
San Francisco’s really wealthy hires their own protection. Those innocuous people parked at a discrete distance are hovering. Additionally they usually have several homes—either in Marin, Atherton or Lake Tahoe if the danger level gets too high. Mayor Lurie has cooled things down considerably. The greatest fear has to be the proposed billionaires tax proposal. Do they really want to take up residence in Florida, Texas or Incline Village, Nevada.
Regarding the shoplifting vibe, do you think the increase in visible anti-theft measures is impacting this? I would argue that people seeing more and more cosmetics/whatever behind locked cages at their local grocery or drug store has an impact.
A "The shampoo never used to be behind locked glass, therefore crime must be up" kind of thing?
That could also feed into what you said about the reverse white-flight exposure?
If a drug store chain puts the shampoo in a case in ALL their stores, regardless of where they are, then it becomes much more visible even in low-crime neighbourhoods.
Also, the social media visibility of it all? I never used to see twitter posts about shoplifting sprees from Anytown, USA because A. I didn't use socials nearly as much because it was just for posting filtered photos of lunch compared to now and B. It didn't seem to have the same level of algorithmic success for getting likes.
But I'm totally with you on death penalty for boombox users. Some tarring and feathering and stockades for speakerphone users on public transit too.
Plus maybe there is some correlation-causation argument too - "There are more immigrants/minorities in my state these past few years and now my shampoo is behind a locked case, therefore its the immigrants/blacks/whatever".
> do you think the increase in visible anti-theft measures is impacting this?
Interesting anecdote: I visited the Philippines for the first time a few weeks ago, and this was one bit of culture shock. Any business more organised than a street stall featured armed security guards, and car park attendants at the larger places had mirrors on a stick to check undersides of vehicles for explosives. I must clarify that at no point did I feel threatened by the people around me; it is merely the fact that these precautions were so ubiquitous that made me wonder about safety and put “wow, my local corner store has started putting the blocks of cheese into plastic anti-theft boxes, what on earth is happening to this place?” into perspective.
I have never actually witnessed shoplifting, but I’m very annoyed by stores putting stuff behind locks, so certainly if I ever complained about shoplifting, I would be talking about stores’ responses to (alleged) shoplifting, not shoplifting itself.
>If a drug store chain puts the shampoo in a case in ALL their stores, regardless of where they are, then it becomes much more visible even in low-crime neighbourhoods.
My anecdotal experience is that chains don't make these changes in all their stores. Certainly not at a national level.
I live in Austin. When traveling to certain other cities in recent years - Chicago and NYC both come to mind - it has stood out to me when I walk into a Target, CVS, or Walgreen's that I see *far* more items in cases than I do at those same retailers' locations in Austin (or in other cities where I've visited one of their stores).
This difference surprises me, by the way. Austin has a sizable visible homeless population, which has grown considerably vs. 10-20 years ago. A progressive DA (Jose Garza) took office here in 2021. I'd expect retailers, particularly ones located in or near downtown Austin, to experience enough shoplifting losses to justify locking many items in cases. Yet that's not what I've observed.
One thing I’ve noticed is that Walmarts in Texas cities used to have an exit in the plant/lawn furniture area at the far end of the store, but most no longer do - making it much less convenient to run in to pick up some potting soil or tomato plants.
I connect this with seeing a homeless guy walk out of the former outdoor exit with a tent.
I don’t like feeling omnipresent despair at the impending collapse of everything either.
It's like there's been a rug pull in the vibes. Maybe this is just me getting older, but I do remember being an adult 15 years ago and thinking things would get better in the future.
"I do remember being an adult 15 years ago and thinking things would get better in the future."
Ugh for real! I'm feel so confused. Is this memory I have of being more optimistic of the future also the result of nostalgia bias? It's so hard to disentangle the truth about how the world existed in the past from my deep, emotional bias about how I feel it was, and that includes my perception of my perceptions.
I can imagine a lot of people responding with "I believe what I see with my eyes and I know what I remember! If you're questioning what you see, you're a sheep."
Of course, we all know here that our observations are biased and our memories are reconstructive. Only by constantly doubting my own beliefs and observations can I make accurate assertions about the world. But every so often, like after reading your comment, I'm left with the feeling of "do I even know anything is real?" I guess this is the sort of crisis Descartes went through every day!
EDIT: I should say at least, I think the data does support the claim that people are more pessimistic now than they were in the recent past, but of course I can't say that with certainty as I don't have any data in front of me right now.
I have another one: More people can afford vacations to Europe and East Asia, where things are just orderly, and rightfully complain that things aren’t as good in the US. Doesn’t matter what the local baseline or history is if it just sucks.
A lot of Scott's subscribers live in San Francisco and have been to Prague, Budapest, and/or Tokyo, and are, hardly unreasonably, sore that their hometown of S.F. isn't as nice as these places with half the average per capita GDP of San Francisco.
Lol some of this is getting a bit insane. SF is certainly not "significantly worse" than Budapest. Do google maps random pin drop 10x in Budapest and 10x in SF.
In European cities, the tourist sections tend to be particularly orderly, while the lowlifes are exiled to the boring outer sections where tourists don't go. In San Francisco, the tourist section became a disgrace until quite recently, while the boring outer sections like Sunset are Basically Fine.
Not only that, but have been to the touristy parts of Prague / Budapest / Tokyo, and are comparing those tourist-friendly areas to SF as a whole.
Prague and Budapest, away from the city center, aren't particularly picturesque (can't speak to Tokyo), but most tourists won't see that part unless they're trying to find a particularly cheap place to stay.
Warsaw in 2025 looks like what many people in 2014 expected downtown Los Angeles to look like in 2025: lots of new skyscrapers, lots of pedestrians, only a few quaint winos.
Yeah classic selection effect because the touristy bits are parts with less disorder. Still, European cities are also full of antisocial behaviors in the streets and in public transportation, and depending on the city you may be forced more to take public transportation VS the USA so you see it more
Need to go norther, I guess. I live in Copenhagen, and there's plenty of graffiti around. But... ah.. so what? What are we even talking about here? Scott wrote about the risk of getting called a “Karen”, and I indeed find it very difficult to restrain from using this term here.
I guess graffiti is mostly the product of either bored teenagers without criminal intent or ideologically-motivated underground skilled artists. How is it in the same category as "drug-fueled homeless zombies roaming the streets" or even just shoplifting?
(On the other hand, I'd like to join the "death penalty for boom box carriers" movement please.)
Cool, I'm sure as a hip, urban progressive you don't mind visible signs of disorder, but most people dislike graffiti, which is why most societies have rules against it.
To paint people who dislike graffiti (probably 90% of the population over 30 years old?) as "Karens" is ridiculous. If you like it so much you should advocate for legalization.
No, I don't like graffiti, and I support laws against it. I just don't think it's a big deal, and I'd strongly oppose any suggestion to deal with it harshly. More importantly, I don't think it's a sign of anything going wrong.
To me, things like slight disorder, breaking minor laws, rules disobedience, deviation from norms to some degree and so on are not just symptoms of a healthy society - they're part of the core mechanism that makes a society healthy. I see graffiti as a part of this, not as another component in some structural problem eating away my way of life.
Excellent comment, you nailed it. Crying this much about adolescents walking around with their friends and spraypainting their name on walls is the epitome of being a Karen.
It's not like the Karens aren't "technically" correct when they complain about jaywalking or kids playing outside, it's just that they're being annoying and stupid about it (much like the rest of these comments)
My impression of every American city I'd ever been to /currently lived in absolutely nosedive after seeing Tokyo /Kyoto/random poor villages in Japan that you've never heard of and I don't remember the names of
I think both of these posts left out a possibility of "Crime has gotten worse, then life got worse in some way in order to prevent the crime, so now the crime rate is low and life is worse".
Walk only during the daytime, lock up goods in the store, avoid that area of town, head on a swivel, etc.
(Related: These pains can remain in place long after the threat has left. You kind-of alluded to this part).
My wife can recall walking a mile each way to first grade in the Austin neighborhood of Chicago in 1966. Her recollections sound like an urbanist dreamscape: here's my Italian grandmother's house and here's my Irish grandmother's house.
Then Martin Luther King moved to Chicago, and a lot of felonious bad stuff ensued that would sound racist to recount. And so four years later she was living on a farm 63 miles outside of Chicago because her liberal parents had lost half their net worth by betting on integration working out, and her new house didn't have indoor plumbing for their first two years.
Many millions of Americans have similar stories to tell, but virtually nobody in the media is interested in hearing them.
This is true, I grew up in a similar place in the 80s. Parents moved 3 times to get away from crime. When I got older, I realized my family experienced a pogrom. Interestingly, narrative really matters. The narrative of that time is white people were racistly moving away to avoid integrated schools. Rather than we were being beaten and robbed, and ran away. History is written by the winners, and we lost. We lost propaganda war because lower middle class people couldn't articulate what was happening, and did in-fact say and do a bunch of racist stuff, that was pretty bad. You can watch videos of south boston folks saying racist stuff about busing, Or Jesse Jackson actually protested my NY Junior highschool in the 70s because of parents pushing back against integration. The book Canarsie Jews and Italians against liberalism is quite good on this topic. As was the Chris Rock show.
The U. of Chicago sociology department mapped out 87 (?) neighborhoods in Chicago in the 1920. Austin is the very large one on the western border of Chicago, just slightly north of Madison. To the west of it is the famous suburb of Oak Park, with its Frank Lloyd Wright prairie style architecture, which native son Ernest Hemingway sneered at for its "broad lawns and narrow minds." Austin was a nice but less spectacular version of Oak Park. My father grew up in Oak Park, my wife in Austin.
Scott's readers don't hear about that Austin much anymore.
This is what the Post misses. A similar mechanism played out in the Bay Area as well: 1. In the Bay Area, it used to be normal to leave backpacks in your car.
2. Bay Area liberal leadership sold people on not policing/imprisoning as a good idea.
3. Car Break-ins skyrocket. Everyone stopped leaving bags in cars, keeping the level of crime flatter than it otherwise would have been, given constant victim behavior. also many dont bothered reporting the break in to police
4. The liberal media could use those stats propagate a lie that the anti-policing ideas didn't have such a bad effect and would interview "${insert sympathetic case}" instead of the 100,000 normals that had their life made materially more inconvenient by a bad idea from their elected leaders and advocated by the liberal establishment.
5. The normals need to signal boost their experience in the face of the aforementioned incompetent/unsympathetic media. So they exaggeratedly talk about crime to compensate
6. They turn to Fox news / local news that reports on something that vibes with their lived experience. while the liberal media continues to ignore them. They become more extreme and create the disconnect that we are presently confounded by.
This pattern exists for many bad liberal ideas like cancel algebra, remove statue, covid shutdown, and unfettered immigration.
The bag thing is an instance of Friedman's Thermostat, although that's always at risk of becoming a generically unfalsifiable response to crime statistics not following one's guess. It's obviously true in some places (eg. the difference between countries where you can vs can't walk through a park at night might not show up in crime rates), but trying to measure it would require clever study design and not just eyeballing published stats.
I agree with the unfalsifiability. It could be that I got richer than my family, so I was more of a target for a car break-in. Or perhaps parents didn't discuss these issues with their children. Perhaps my family/childhood life was shut in, and as I got older, I went out more, increasing the propensity for such things to happen to me. My anecdote has its own confounders. But I can clearly see that school/Media failed to warn me about this, and warned me about a hundred liberal darling concerns of no use to me. So I "compensate" for that when advising my own family and friends.
The pattern with cars finally ends, if you’re smart*, with leaving your car *unlocked* so that it may be perused without window smashing, which is under your deductible.
*Did you notice the beautiful shining river of auto glass along the road where everyone parks for the greenbelt? Pretty. Like art!
No, you take all your stuff with you. Though in my case, and one of the reasons I will never sell my car, along with the fact that it doesn't beep when the seatbelt is off, it being a matter of indifference to the car - and the reason I didn't balk an instant at replacing the spark plugs for well more than its blue book value, is that the trunk lever by the driver's seat hasn't worked in years. So I *can* Leave My Valuables in the trunk, it being a lockbox.
Now it's true that where we currently live, your car will be immediately rifled through if you leave it unlocked; and locked, it will not be smashed for the noise, since we all park adjacent to our apartments. The last time it happened (forgetting to lock) to my husband's 2017 vehicle, oddly all that we could detect was taken, was the vehicle manual from the glove box.
Oh no, how will we ever change the clock on daylight savings again? I said. The thief will have to come by and do it for us.
This could also manifest itself as, e.g., San Francisco not having the kind of vending machines that are everywhere in Japan, because they would be broken into within a week. This doesn't show up in a statistic but makes life worse.
I think about how my former city, riding the wave of the waning environmental movement which it had once embraced with a certain amount of fervor in comparison to other cities, announced it was going to be a Zero Waste city: everything would be recycled or composted. It even started a curbside fabric recycling program, now forgotten.
Now it spends a great deal of money filling shipping container after shipping container with the vast quantity of Stuff than is left in every woods and drainage, by its homeless population. All for the landfill.
Needless to say there hasn't been a peep about Zero Waste in years.
What people on this blog don't seem to grasp is that they have their exemplars, their forerunners, in the past; and those people who were functionally the same as the commenters here, in terms of their role in society, wanted to do things like "become sustainable".
So it doesn't really matter if people say, what's it to me? I don't care about this. That's Boomer stuff.
No one can care about it anymore. It's part of the loss. And y'all's enthusiasms may well suffer the same fate, as priorities become ever cruder.
It might be true thay theyd be immediately robbed. But vending machines are basically illegal in most of SF due to business permitting and land use regulations. Score another point for Japan style YIMBYism.
Risk compensation models say that observed trends (i.e. a fall in achieved crime rate) understate, not overstate, the underlying cause (a fall in the risk of crime victimization holding constant victim behavior).
Risk substitution is the hypothesis that when you make a risky behavior safer, people indulge in the risky behavior more, partially offsetting safety gains. So, e.g., when you add anti-lock brakes to cars, the collision rate goes down by less than you might expect a priori if you just checked how many collisions would have been avoided by reduced stopping distance. This is because people respond to anti-lock brakes by driving faster and following more closely. Similarly, if risky behavior gets more dangerous, people will be more careful, and so the empirical decline in injuries from risky behavior will increase by less than you would expect a priori.
That seems too convenient. Really, not only have lifestyle changes successfully avoided the crime, those lifestyle changes cut the crime rate by a factor of a few? In addition to every measure of disorder, like graffiti and littering?
If the behavior of the would-be victims is what drew criminals into these victim's previously ordered parts of town, no longer presenting an easy target would make it less likely for criminals to go to those parts of town.
The cycle would be: presenting behavior that makes you an easy victim draws in criminals, criminals generally increase disorder, increased criminality leads to no more victim behavior, diminished victim behavior leads to fewer criminals, fewer criminals leads to less disorderly behavior.
Mind you, I think increased law enforcement is also a big factor, but I think behavior modification is a big part of it.
I'm trying to succinctly express the problem I have with this hypothesis. It's something like "this requires very different parts of the system to be synced up and responsive to each other in ways that just don't seem very plausible."
Like, in order for this hypothesis to hold, a bunch of people in the rich neighborhoods--people who presumably have a decently wide variety of personal experiences and risk tolerances--to coordinate sufficiently well on these self-protective behaviors that the whole community presents a harder target. And then, once the criminals have moved on, they have to continue with the behaviors whose usefulness has now mostly diminished.
You could tell a story where this is all very integrated and adaptive: some people loosen up a little, and the criminals come back a little and target those people, so they stop loosening up. But first, that would seem to require a much higher victimization rate than is actually observed, to carry the signal in that much detail. And second, it seems like you lose any ability to explain the change over time: why would things have shifted slowly but significantly from a higher crime equilibrium to a lower crime one?
Yes, I think something like this could explain the situation with shoplifting. There's an acceptable loss rate for stores, and if the actual loss rate goes higher than that, they lock up certain products.
In some neighborhoods, I've seen men's socks and underwear in locked cabinets at Target. That probably solves the shoplifting issue but it makes it very inconvenient to buy them for myself.
I think there might be additional trends that are part of this phenomenon but aren’t being taken into account. One obvious one is the aging of society, and how that impacts how people perceive and react to both crime and disorder.
Looking at it anecdotally, I was a kid in the high-crime 80s in NJ/NY, and mostly I didn’t *care*. Muggings were things that happened to other people, and I had the typical attitude of invincibility that kids have. Risks were background noise.
Fast forward 4 decades, a career, a wife, a home, and two kids later, and I simply am far more risk averse than I used to be. A weirdo on a bus/train went from something my buddies and I might laugh at, to a mild concern on the way to work, to a potential threat to my young family, to something terrible that might happen to a loved one because I’m not going anywhere near a bus or subway, etc.
Multiply that by millions as the average age of society increases and you have a greater proportion of the population in more risk-averse stages of life, and you might see an objective decrease in various types of crime and disorder coupled with a far greater concern about them.
I was wondering when you were going to bring up the Vibecession post. I have a feeling that there's a lot of "general malaise" going around which underlines a lot of the negativity surrounding issues which appear statistically fine.
If I try and think back to the 2000s and early 2010s, I can't recall much alarm at disorder or crime levels. It feels like very much a recent phenomenon. Take shoplifting as an example. It's hard to see in the stats, but intuitively we would expect shoplifting to rise in difficult economic periods. Nonetheless, I can't recall shoplifting being an issue post 2008. It's only now, post-Pandemic, that shoplifting seems to have risen massively in salience. And I think this is in large part down to a greater propensity towards negative feeling.
Or maybe crime declined post-2008 because crime these days is less due to Jean LeJean stealing a loaf of bread to feed his starving family but is instead due to Crimes of Exuberance?
Deaths of Exuberance, such as homicides and traffic fatalities, tend to correlate with cash in pocket, in contrast to Case and Deaton's Deaths of Despair.
When in late May 2025, The Science proved that Blacks shouldn't worry about covid anymore but should instead be out and about protesting racism and the police shouldn't dare pull them over for speeding and search them for illegal handguns, black deaths by traffic fatality and shooting homicide exploded in June 2020 and stayed very high for several more years. In essence, Black Lives Murdered got a few tens of thousands of incremental black lives murdered and splattered on the asphalt, but the press and academia don't like to talk about it because they have so much black blood on their hands, so they attribute it to covid.
As with the idea that the pandemic rather than Hurricane Floyd increased crime, you have to explain why the same pattern was not seen in other advanced countries:
Jean Valjean is a fictional character, while the crime declines in the Great Depression & Great Recession, along with increases in the Great 60s Freakout, are real.
Factor in government transfers and material poverty rates did not increase significantly during the Great Recession. Maybe crime didn't increase with the recession because poverty doesn't cause crime, or maybe it's because welfare works. That one data point cannot tell us either way.
This. Depression rates are through the roof, and depression imposes a negative prior on judgments about the world. And so we have the paradoxical phenomenon where life is improving while everyone warns the apocalypse is nigh.
The progressive intersectional theory that society is the reason we don't live in the warmth of collectivism of a relative paradise may be the devil on everyone's shoulder at this point
I have no personal belief in that theory, yet I feel apprehendably demoralized simply by the repetition of the claim. With society delegitimized people feel like things are illegitimate, failing, decaying
> If I try and think back to the 2000s and early 2010s, I can't recall much alarm at disorder or crime levels.
I remember the opposite. I remember reading about how people's perception of crime was much higher than actual crime, around the late aughts. The standard thing to blame was the media and the 24 hour news cycle, which needed to bring in eyeballs with a constant stream of fear-inducing crime stories.
I think everyone remembers that. People kept being told that other people were worried about crime, but that they shouldn’t be. Now we’re all being told that the country is falling apart, and if we can’t see the horrible people we keep hearing about it’s because they’re outside our bubbles.
>It's only now, post-Pandemic, that shoplifting seems to have risen massively in salience
All those videos out of SF and NYC of groups just walking into stores and walking back out with bags full of stuff probably play a role in that perception.
Could just be me aging but the soft-judge phenomenon seems to be more prominent than it was from 90s-00s, and that certainly plays a role in the perception of crime in some bubbles.
I've seen the difference between apple turning the flippin phones off once stolen, and just giving them away to the looters. The shoplifting tends to end when the shoplifters are keelhauled and Not Paid To Shoplift by "Well Stupid Companies." (stupid instead of well-meaning, because I don't think they meant well at all, for anyone).
If you look carefully at weekly statistics from 2020, it's clear that the main impact on homicides, traffic fatalities, and other forms of crime and disorder was not covid in March 2020 but the George Floyd "racial reckoning" in late May 2020. But the media blaming it on covid raises fewer questions about the wisdom of the media.
This makes me wonder if the issue is more one of visibility rather than actual disorder.
Up until 2000 or so: Disorder that is not newsworthy or that is against the main media narrative of the day (like the local crime that drove a lot of white flight) gets very little reporting, so people only see the bits that they happen across.
2000-present: More and more of the disorder is captured on video/photos and shared widely, so things that were known about but seldom seen become more visible and more salient.
I think this pattern happened wrt police brutality--my low-confidence impression is that US police are less brutal, corrupt, and racist now than at basically any point in the past[1], but once cellphone videos of a cop kicking the sh-t out of someone for excessive mouthiness start popping up on Youtube, it *feels* like the cops have suddenly gone nuts and started beating everyone up all the time.
[1] I'd guess this statement is true for basically any time from 2000-present, though I am open to data to the contrary.
Yeah, I think it's a combination of negativity bias and visibility.
And a bit more specifically than just visibility, like you point out about cellphone videos, it's the virality. Maybe 30 or 40 years ago an isolated case of police brutality was basically local news, but now it becomes national news in less than a day, and people wholly disconnected from it get outraged (regardless of the quality of their actual local police).
This makes sense when you think of BLM protests overseas--whatever problems exist in the UK or France wrt policing, they are surely very different from the problems that exist in Minneapolis, USA.
Homicide is likely to have very different drivers than shoplifting? I'd never stolen stuff when I had reasonable amounts of money. I've stolen stuff when skint -- not starving level skint but just very poor. Sure, personal anecdote ain't data but this is fairly plausible mechanisms: people want to steal stuff more when they can't buy it. Whether they will steal it will depend on many other factors of course.
Violent crime doesn't have such obvious and clear possible relationship to "less money". There might be indirect causality via stress for example, but not as obvious.
When you stole something, did the shopkeeper know about it, and let you get away with it? There's "still a payin' customer" levels of stealing, and then there's the rent-a-cop will splat you on the ground level of stealing.
It was always big supermarkets, I'd not steal from identifiable people, and I am fairly certain staff didn't know, but maybe? UK supermarkets do prosecute shoplifters, but idk how consistently. I just walked out with things like large packets of nappies in the bottom basket of my (middle class looking, three wheeler/all terrain, tho second hand) pram that I just wouldn't put on the checkout belt. Wine bottle or squash or, idk, coffee or nice cheese in the folded hood. Jar of jam in jacket pocket. Yes, still a paying customer -- they likely still made profit of my other purchases overall even with the stolen stuff.
Knew a guy who worked produce in a rural supermarket. He'd probably have let you take the nappies (you're still buying the inordinately expensive baby food, after all), but the wine? or cheese? or Jam? Wouldn't have flown.
But you'd be surprised how much folks notice and don't say boo about, particularly if you look regretful and are doing it for your kids (and otherwise pay your money like a good person do).
If you were doing this after 2014, you may have been benefitting from the perception (well-founded or otherwise) that nobody in the criminal justice system would do anything about shoplifting as long as each offence involved less than £200. https://fullfact.org/government-tracker/immunity-shoplifting-law/
Regardless, while I’m sure things were tough for you at the time, UK supermarkets operate on incredibly thin profit margins (their profits rely on bulk), which is why UK food prices are relatively low. Stealing a bottle of wine could easily have made you an overall loss as a customer. People stealing from supermarkets increases the price of food for everyone.
Early 2000s, so the £200 thing wouldn't apply. Also, I'm not sure how much of a factor this is as I've seen (in the actual court -- my work takes me there occasionally nowadays, not thieving from 25 years ago) people charged with stealing sandwiches from a SPAR, leg of lamb from somewhere I forgot and £36 worth of clothing from M&S. All in Scotland, maybe that makes a difference.
After George Floyd's demise on May 25, 2020, the American Establishment (politicians, media, academia, corporations, etc.) made clear that blacks should be policed less.
So, blacks partied more, drove faster, carried guns with them more, stole more, and shot each other more.
Economists Case and Deaton coined the term Deaths of Despair in 2015 for deaths by suicide, opioid overdose, and alcoholism.
In 2021, I coined the term Deaths of Exuberance for homicides and motor vehicle accidents.
For example, it was widely predicted in March 2020 that lockdowns would lead to more domestic murders. That made sense, but it barely happened.
Instead what did happen was a huge explosion of mass shootings at black parties post-George Floyd (not the carefully planned Columbine-style mass shootings) but the more wounded than dead mass shootings where one lowlife feels dissed so he pulls out his illegal handgun and starts blasting away in the general direction of the disser, hitting people standing around in the background eating a plate of ribs.
Or takes a more minor law infraction. Private fireworks are illegal in California, so after the first stimulus check and the rent moratorium, lots of working class Southern Californians drove to Nevada and bought a ton of fireworks. Thus July 4, 2020 in Los Angeles heard unbelievable numbers of frontyard fireworks going off from 8pm to 3am nonstop. Check out the traffic helicopter views of July 4, 2020 in Los Angeles.
Similarly, the rise of shoplifting was not due to hunger and despair, but due to the retreat of the cops during the Racial Reckoning, so lots of people had a blast looting stores.
>The problem: people hate crime and think it’s going up
I believe this is the quasi-universal experience across all modern societies. If that's the case, why would the modern USA's attitude require a special explanation?
On that note, what is the experience of other countries? UK crime seems to have been mainly straight up from the beginning of the 20th century till 1991, then declining.
The UK has two datasets (Police Recorded Crime and Crime Survey of England and Wales) which have an irritating tendency to go in different directions, and probably not for the fun causal reason that occurs to people.
The crime people care about for the purposes of the UK's version of this debate (robbery in London) has seemingly gone up in the last few years.
In recent years UK has had big surges in shop-lifting, illegal sales of smuggled tobacco products, county-lines drugs and drink-spiking. Probably also in grooming gangs but that tends to stay off the radar. We've also had big increases in computer crime altho much of that originates abroad.
I wonder if the feeling of increased crime correlates with the view that there's no point in reporting it to the police cos they won't do anything, and if so which is the cause and which the effect?
Surely no-one really cares about "illegal sales of tobacco products"? It's a purely admin type "crime" that maps to nothing but admin rules about revenue collection ?
People sure seem to care when they think the illegal tobacco is a wartime drone from Russia, so sure, at least someone, somewhere cares about illegal sales of tobacco products.
(Not commenting about the Isles in particular, you understand).
The police may care about it, but how many normal citizens are upset that there is someone out there selling cigarettes without the right permission/taxes being collected?
As written, this is misleading. It's not the case that selling single cigarettes carried a death penalty; rather, Garner was being charged with selling singles and died in the process of apprehending him because of a pre-existing medical condition and Garner choosing to resist arrest.
The plural of anecdote is not data. But given your lack of context on the UK I will add that my impression of London is not of graffiti doubling since peak London in 2012. It feels pretty stable, as does littering. Far less graffitied than US cities, far more than Asian ones. Mixed versus Europe but probably lower on the whole. Zurich for instance appears far safer and cleaner but does seem to have more graffiti. I think maybe there's been a slight shift in tolerance to "street art". Violent crime in the UK feels down (confident), disorder feels flat, shoplifting feels slightly higher, bike theft seems higher but maybe just getting more attention for lack of policing, online/phone based fraud feels massively up (very confident).
I'll second that, London doesn't feel more graffitied than it has in the last couple of decades; there was a brief period a year ago when a large chunk of the tube trains got heavily graffitied in one go, either because someone broke into the depot or because of some kind of policy change about cleaning them.
Mostly outside London, there was a moderately sized wave of graffiti over Gaza last year, almost all of it relatively well-drawn Palestinian flags, which I'd guess get reported a lot more than "Stubzy woz ere" does so might be outsized on the statistics.
The plural of anecdote absolutely is data, in a direct and unambiguous way. Hell, the original saying was in fact "the plural of anecdote is data." Pet peeve of mine when people regurgitate cliches without even thinking about the words mean ("the purpose of a system is what it does" is another example that comes to mind form some reason I can't quite put my finger on).
The problem with anecdotes-as-data-points is that they are not sampled in any kind of uniform way. Anecdotes are sampled for interestingnesss, memorability, etc.
I don't know whether the original formulation was "the plural of anecdote is data" or "the plural of anecdote is not data" but the latter makes more sense.
Now you're moving the goalposts by changing it from a statement about data to a statement about quality of data. The statement that you think makes more sense is, literally, incorrect.
Presumably the plural of anything is data if data is just a collection of information. Peeve on.
The plural of anecdote is not quality data that we can use to inform discussions or decisions. The shorthand for quality data that we can use to inform discussions or decisions is data. It was not written without thought.
When you say shoplifting feels slightly higher, what is informing that feeling? I assume it's not like graffiti where you have some rough estimate of how much you've personally witnessed.
It didn't get a confident attached to it because the sample set is low - as you say there's a lot less to look at. But I have witnessed some shoplifting recently. I've never seen it first hand in the past but I did hear second hand accounts of it. On balance - seeing myself feels like more but it wouldn't take a lot to change my mind.
> "house prices are up since the pandemic, so it’s no surprise that there are more homeless people, and more of the usual bad things downstream of homeless people"
Do we have good reason to believe in such causality? I'd imagine that the type of homelessness that is caused by expensive housing (regular people crashing at a friend's house or staying at a motel or sleeping in a camper van or whatever) differs from the type of homelessness that causes bad things (mentally ill people living on the streets in the middle of a city).
There's an extensive treatment of this somewhere I can't find right now, but the shirt answer is that "regular people crashing on a sofa" is way more likely to eventually turn into "messed up people on the street" when house prices are very high. There are a lot of people who are borderline one or the other: basically stable and functional if they're inside and with some support, but can go off the rails if sleeping rough with druggies.
Yes, this is well-studied. The YIMBY folks are all over this, because a common NIMBY argument is that homelessness has nothing to do with housing supply, homeless people are just schizophrenic drug addicts, what can you do.
Yes, Zillow even conducted a big study about this. Homelessness goes up as housing prices go up, and the inflection point is when housing exceeds a third of your income.
Mental illness alone is not a cause of homelessness. Where rents are only $300-$600/month (as in Tokyo), mentally ill people can still afford an apartment even with just a part time job.
No one is questioning that higher housing costs cause more homelessness – that's just basic supply and demand. What I'm questioning is whether (or to what extent) it causes the sort of disordered homelessness that has large negative externalities, such as one hears about happening in San Fransisco, and not just the marginal homelessness that lots of regular people go through.
I vividly remember the smell of one Tokyo man who I presume must have been homeless as a result of mental illness. Quite possibly there were other causes as well, but I would presume that some sort of mental disorder was the main one.
My point is that he's NOT homeless, but would if the family were not able to afford a spare bedroom for him. The way it's looking right now he might wind up kicked out and homeless anyway.
More generally, I think there are a fair number of people in this general category--they are not homeless because of the kindness/charity of family/friends/church/whatever, or because they have some precarious stability thanks to some kind of retirement or disability or public assistance. But also this is a kind of safety net that can go away really quickly if, for example, you are scary/violent/crazy enough that your brother decides he's no longer willing to let you stay in the same house as his kids, or that your buddy who was letting you sleep in his spare room decides that enough is enough and gives you the boot.
I was that kid. No one could figure it out. The family did not understand. They tried to move it through the mental health system -- the doctors did not understand. My community did not understand -- they thought bricks and mortar reality made sense for me.
It has been a lifetime of struggle to escape society. Everyone is my enemy. For some strange reason that I could never fully explain but knew was true I needed to live apart from others. There were all these friends and money and fun --- none of that was for me. It has been an endless battle against keeping the waves of people out of my life-- Even to this day the battle continues.
Until now no one had ever been able to clearly say why this might be. Why would people seem so contrary to social norms? Throughout all of human history the mystery of what makes people who they are has not been known with any great precision.
However, after a lifetime ... I finally know. I had my full genome sequenced. It was a jaw drop moment.
I have polygenic scores near 90th or approaching the 100th percentile for:
- schizophrenia
- PTSD
- autism adjacent behavior and
- anxiety disorder.
Other close family exhibit all of these traits. My family also has dominant Alzheimer's disease. Early stage cognitive impairment of a parent became evident when I was a teenager; later this progressed to very severe dementia . As a teenager, none of this context was provided to those outside of our family.
The many years of unrecognized and untreated PTSD has largely conditioned me to accept myself as having schizoid personality disorder. This was not inevitable, but the many years of untreated trauma has made me very glad to simply not have PTSD type responses.
What does all this mean for the NEET in question?
My first observation would be to understand other people's reality as valid. People are playing out the genetic script that their parents have given them. People are exactly what their genetics has told them to be. Forcing normative reality onto a genetic script that is not normative is very unhelpful. It is easy to float through school without ever being made to realize that you are expected to accept normative reality. For me, almost immediately when I became recognized as an adult I was expected to embrace normative understanding of the social world. Yet, for me this was simply not who I was. It probably would be better to think about this earlier in life. With genetics known at birth shaping a life for people becomes dramatically easier. I see homelessness, prison and mental hospitals as largely an attempt at negative conditioning. Basically, punish people until they accept normative reality. Given our current knowledge of genetics that seems a hopelessly unwise strategy. For me, there is largely no way, given my genetics, that I could accept normative reality. Punishment without a purpose.
Full genomic sequencing with full polygenic scores would also be highly sensible. The technology is underdeveloped, but the headline type results near the tails above 90 and below 10 percentiles start to give you some idea of what is happening.
With polygenics it is important to understand is that two phenotypically normal people can produce offspring that might be fairly far tail. An offspring might be 1 or 2 SD for a trait that neither the parents have. That can make things difficult. My parents had no insight into the problems that I was having because they did not share the problems to the extent that I did. So, simply knowing what the problem is could be helpful. You could then seek out others in bricks or mortar or online that also share understanding into what you might be coping with; medical professionals who lack lived experience with mental disorders can be surprisingly unaware of the true nature of psychopathology. Almost all of the advice given to me by normies was exactly the wrong advice.
The level of ignorance related to this question is simply startling. I have found that no matter how progressive people might claim to be they simply will not tolerate this type of neuro-divergence. My perspective is that society has been profoundly abusive towards those who are different and simply will not offer reasonable accommodations that could make life easier for them. The resulting costs to society are truly enormous. As soon as I set myself in a life that worked for me (remote, socially isolating, etc.), life has been great. School choice would have been such a blessing for me. It would have allowed me to have more control over my life and to help form the social world that was compatible with my personality.
It has taken a lifetime of hardship to finally reach the life that I am genetically programmed to live. After struggling against my family, friends and community I am finally very very happy; my life has actually worked out surprisingly well (as long as I walk in the precise opposite direction that is suggested to me by normative reality everything is great for me). I hope that my life experience can help the child in question avoid a similar life of adversity. Hopefully, it can add a bit of insight into this situation and help things to turn out better.
Recently, a report was described of an individual who scored in the top 1% for schizophrenia, AND bipolar illness AND autism. That is a truly astonishingly rare combination. You would expect that in one in a million people. This person was also orphaned as a teenager. He was unable to successfully enroll in art school. He then spent several years homeless.
That was Adolf Hitler.
How could someone with such profound life challenge be offered zero community support? The social anosognosia is startling! Might the normative assumption that everyone is largely the same living the same basic life plan be incorrect? The resulting social devastation that Hitler wrought on the world was then the consequence of the ignorance.
People say "Never again" and yet the obvious policy steps to achieve this have never actually been enacted. The correct policy response is self-evident -- people at truly profound life disadvantage should be provided for -- not told to live on the street. A 1 in a million social backstop wound not be expensive -- surprisingly many even with considerable disadvantage need very minimal resources; more simple accommodations. Indeed a $1 insurance premium to fund those with 1 in a million genotypes would cover these ultra rare instances. For whatever reason parents of newborns do not find it worthwhile to protect our future and make such a payment. That is the world that they want to bring their newborn into.
The irony that I have seen in my own life experience (with considerably less profound disadvantage) is that life can then work out surprisingly well. For me, something as simple as online learning has been transformative. Once the social landscape is removed, I have had zero life problems. Notably this option was never offered to me before college. Yet, when resources are withheld completely even when desperately required that the outcome can be especially bad.
The lesson then is not so much that the 1 in a million people are inherently the problem, but it is more the profound obliviousness of the community to provide reasonable care for those in extreme need. With modern technology it only requires a $50 gene chip at birth to identify those who will need help and then provide it to them (when and if needed). No nation has yet realized how critically important it is to spend that $50.
The Santa Ana river in Orange County, CA had about 10,000 white opioid addicts camped there, largely from the midwest, living along it in 2018. They tended to come to SoCal for the 3 months of drug rehabilitation under Obamacare. But after 3 months, they still loved drugs. Plus, the weather in Orange County was a lot nicer than in Kentucky. And their old lady back home had moved in with their best friend. So, rather than go home to Kentucky, they went to Walmart and bought a lot of camping gear. You can buy a lot of meth and fentanyl when you are not paying rent, so why not live in a high-rent part of the country with nice weather?
High housing prices don’t just turn stably housed people into people crashing on their friend’s couch - they also turn people who can host their friend on their couch to people who don’t have enough space to help out a friend who needs help. Scott posted a link to a good study about this a few months back, which found that the increased difficulty of providing bridge housing to friends and family is actually a really big effect.
Sure, it makes sense that that would have an effect on where homeless people sleep. E.g. I believe that in Tokyo (where small homes are the norm), it is common to sleep in 24h internet cafés and similar establishments. The part I'm not so convinced about is where that would lead to an increase in the type of homeless that cause this disorder that people are experiencing in places like San Fransisco.
There are two types of homelessness: the invisible kind where you are sleeping on a friend or relative's couch because you are between jobs; and the visible kind where you are sleeping on the street because you spend every penny you get on drugs and nobody who knows you will never let you in their house anymore after the various Bad Things you've done to them and to their kids.
The second kind of homelessness where you pay no rent is most common in high rent districts like Venice Beach. If you aren't going to pay any rent, why live in some depressing low rent district? Instead, it makes sense to live large at a world famous beach. It's also easier to get money surrounded by tourists and rich people than in some working class neighborhood.
Huh, I just noticed that your comment seems a lone voice on the topic here on ACX. Scott hasn't made any reference to the ICE scandals so far, has he. Too culture-wary? I'm skeptical.
And maybe I haven't been reading the open threads thoroughly, but I don't recall reading anything about it there, either.
I wonder if my impression is off or if there really is a very drastic ignoring of the situation in these circles.
I imagine it is in part a desire to not, especially not before the story has settled, dive into the culture war. I don’t remember a George Floyd post immediately after that, either.
I guess you're right - I had the impression that the ICE scandals are quite old by now (I'm not from the US), but at least the first killings seem to be "only" a month old.
Agreed, and I think there's wisdom to the approach. Delaying posts on these topics gives them room to be thoughtful and to adopt the wide view, rather than being narrowly focused and reactionary. What would an immediate post even say? "I'm generally opposed to unprovoked extra-judicial killings by government-employed quasi-peacekeeper agencies"? Sure, join the club.
I don't know if there's a name for it, but practicing the societal equivalent of a civility pause over issues like this just seems like good sense.
It’s a little strange to say he’s trying to avoid culture war posts when he’s right in the middle of a sequence of attempts to appease the other side in the culture war!
Yeah, Scott doesn't ignore culture war topics, but he'll only weigh in if he has something interesting to say about it, preferably something that floats above the fray and takes a "here's where both sides are wrong" point of view.
There just doesn't seem to be anything all that interesting to say about this topic. Most of it comes down to very precise details about police training and procedures, and pretty soon you're measuring wheel angles.
I don't think your impression is off. To his credit, Scott did mention "pushing back against claims that we should take the authoritarian bargain to stop it", but I don't think he or the ACX community really wants to reckon with the authoritarian bargain we have already made.
Aside from crimes the US government is committing against its own citizens (which are not limited to murder), there is an argument to be made that in fact the west has "fallen" due to the disorderly behavior of the Executive Branch of the US government over the last 12 months. In the (not necessarily very) long run this is likely to have far greater impact on American's lives and prosperity than CVS putting shampoo bottles behind glass cases.
But I think many are just hoping that AI will save us (despite the extensive efforts of many in the rationalist/ACX community to explain why this is a foolish hope).
> Aside from crimes the US government is committing against its own citizens (which are not limited to murder), there is an argument to be made that in fact the west has "fallen" due to the disorderly behavior of the Executive Branch of the US government over the last 12 months.
I love a good argument that the West has fallen but Oswald Spengler published The Decline of the West in 1918 and 1922 so I have trouble taking seriously the argument that it was because of something that happened in the last 12 months.
To be fair, not everyone in the broader ACX community is ignoring these issues, Zvi felt compelled to say something about ICE in his most recent blog post (https://thezvi.substack.com/p/monthly-roundup-39-february-2026), even though it is well outside his usual baliwick. And Zvi reliably criticizes the administration on topics such as tariffs, chip exports, energy, grift, that are directly relevant to his blog. I don't think Zvi is ignoring the domestic situation (and how bad it is in general, this is not just about ICE) to the extent many others are.
I've seen a few discussions in open threads here, but I can't remember if they were in the public threads or the subscriber-only threads. If I recall correctly, majority opinion was along the lines of "sending poorly trained agents with guns into big protests is culpably bad policy," but I might be biased in my recall.
Scott himself seems interested in more-quantifiable harms like aid cuts or RFK
This comment was on Open Thread 418. A Minneapolis resident described his experience and what he'd been witnessing. It turned into a very long comment chain.
Its true that most people can just ignore shoplifting by doing their shopping on Amazon, but just because it’s rare doesn’t mean that we should ignore it entirely.
I don't think they can, actually. The proper new term for shoplifters is porch pirates, and most working men (as opposed to the pajama class) can't avoid them with any regularity, or at least without expense.
I don't think it should be ignored entirely, either.
But it should be entirely understandable that people apply a different valence to something that affects them directly daily or weekly compared to something that affects them quite distantly once or twice a year, if that.
Somewhat related to this in the sense of powerful people creating disorder, I wonder to what extent elite impunity (Epstein files, more open bribery and corruption) makes people more sensitive to crime at all levels. Are we more primed to notice disorder in our own experience (even if it is lower than what we experienced without noticing as much before) because we see it at higher levels of society? Algorithmic sharing of crimes on social media could also prime us in the same way.
You do realize the DC Madam was operating for decades? America's never been a shining example of uncorrupt behavior.
You do realize the Obamas got into one of the "good schools" in DC for their kids? That might not have been an outright bribe, but those schools and placement in such are nearly ALWAYS a bribe.
If you don't realize the corruption that's already there, you have no basis for saying you understand what Trump is doing. (And this, I hear from someone who says Trump encourages his family to bet on his decisions -- why not make some cash off gulls?).
I do realize corruption has always existed and didn’t just start with Trump, being as I wasn’t born yesterday. The brazenness now is significantly different as compared to much of the 20th and early 21st century, the span of time most relevant to people’s perception of crime
"It is time the nation woke up and realized that it's not the armed robbers or drug dealers who cause the most economic harm, it's the white collar criminals living in the most expensive homes who have the most impressive resumes who harm us the most. They steal our pensions, bankrupt our companies, and destroy thousands of jobs, ruining countless lives." --Harry Markopolos
>You do realize the Obamas got into one of the "good schools" in DC for their kids? That might not have been an outright bribe, but those schools and placement in such are nearly ALWAYS a bribe.
Lol, but not I think in this case...
"Who are the new applicants for places at our prestigious and much sought after school?"
"Oh, one is the presidents daughter and the second is the presidents other daughter...."
"Welcome aboard!"
Not sure you'd need to bribe any school to get such prestigious alumni and/or members of the PTA waved in past any normal processes.
Do you realize that you've just said that every school is populated by narcissistic teachers? I mean, that might be right, but... I'm going to continue to hope that there is a school, somewhere, where that's not the case. (Remember that certain schools are magnets, there to nourish specific talents -- those are the ones I'd hope we could find at least one that would say "you're the president's daughter, and you aren't qualified").
What? What have the teachers got to do with it? Admissions decisions will be made by the principal/head or an administrator. Teachers don't get to choose their intake. They will have no input into this decision.
The principal/head/admin are interested in the profile of their school, and its ability to attract future pupils, alumni donations and general school reputation. Thats literally their job. Having the presidents children at your school is going to boost its attractiveness to other pupils with rich parents. Taking them into your school is an absolute win for them even if they're thick as pig sh*t.
Seeing as you started this convo on "we all know bribes are paid to join these prestigious schools" ... just on the basis that "if we take the presidents children, we can extract larger ~~bribes~~ donations from dozens of other parents keen to put their kids in the same school as the presidents children" its an absolute no brainer.
Maybe Mr "Deca-Millionaire" has to donate to get his kid a place, but any school in the country would take the presidents kids. Particularly if its a school who's business model relies on "extracting the maximum possible donations from many Mr Deca-Millionaires" as taking the presidents kids will extract larger donations from many Mr Deca-Millionaires than they otherwise could have extracted.
That would bother me too. Fortunately it's not happening. Neither of those deaths were murder. At worst they were manslaughter. Police make mistakes and if you go out of your way to provoke them into making them then in my view you deserve what you get. Having my shampoo locked behind glass does, in fact, bother me much more. If I had the choice between eliminating the need for shoplifting deterrents and bringing Renee Good back to life, I would choose the former without much deliberation.
I decline to use the word "deserve" here, because I think it implies everyone had plenty of time to sit down and consider all the factors before concluding that Renee Good deserved to die, and then solemnly carried out the verdict.
Based on what I saw, Good put herself in a high-risk-of-death situation, but I also believe it's not the case that everyone who puts himself or herself in a high-risk-of-death situation "deserves" to die for it. One arguably deserves the risk, not the payoff or lack thereof. In her case, it was decidedly on her in the sense that there were other, much safer ways she could have gone about protesting.
Oh sure. I didn't mean that in a deliberative wheels-of-justice way. I meant it in the same way you'd say it about a burglar who tried to break in through a skylight and then fell to his death, or about a drunk driver who got injured in an accident. Some combination of "that's on them" and "it's nice when bad things happen to bad people".
I think it would be beneficial to consider some lines of inquiry that are less generous to the people who are sure that crime has gotten worse since they were children In the late 1980s and early 1990s. That's not really the ouvre of this blog, which is a good thing, but in this case this level of generosity probably leads one astray. Reading the comments from the previous post I'm inclined to attribute the vibe crime wave to one of the following.
(1) Conservative people care a lot about and are horrified by crime. I have become more conservative. Therefore crime has increased.
(2) In the past, I was younger, more attractive, and more hopeful. These are good things. Low crime is also a good thing. Therefore in the past crime was lower.
(3) As I have gotten older, the world has changed in ways that are confusing and sometimes scary. Crime is also confusing and scary. Therefore crime has increased.
Not so much "lines of inquiry" as various ways to formulate "my opponents are big dumb-dumb-heads & are totally wrong for dumb-dumb reasons, lmao"; not sure I can see much utility in the exercise (aside from, perhaps, personal feelings of satisfaction or the like).
If someone is really confident about a narrative that's contradicted by the evidence and remains confident after seeing the evidence, these are hypotheses that are worth considering. At some point, "my opponents are big dumb-dumb-heads" becomes a realistic possibility.
Alas, when people tried that- quite accurately- in 2020, it didn't go well for them. Why do you expect it to work here? Just because calling conservatives stupid is more acceptable in your social groups than calling progressives stupid?
Most people are kinda dumb, but why is the existence of a left half of the bell curve manifesting in a widespread belief that there's more crime and disorder now than in the past when it's hard to see so much evidence of that in available data?
Yes, that was my point about considering less generous reasons that people believe these things. I think that's the more parsimonious explanation for why people believe this stuff.
You honestly think that none of those are reasonable possible explanations for any percentage of the observations? Your blanket (100%) dismissal seems far more egregious than his suggestion that observer bias might account for some (non 100%) of observations.
Actually, between the two comments, I think Abe's is the closer to implying that "100% of the explanation is X"; mine can't (or maybe it can, but wasn't intended to) be read as saying that *none* of the trend is caused by people being dumb-dumb-heads—just that it's hard to go anywhere interesting once you're positing this as the sole, or a near-universal, explanation.
I.e., it functions as a sort of "stop thinking about this" indicator. Warrantedly so, I suppose, when true—but I feel like we'd want to be pretty sure before ceasing inquiry on such a basis.
(That said, I do find it useful upon occasion—for example, it appears nearly without exception as the cause of disagreements with yours truly, according to my investigations–)
If you want to read, “we should consider other lines of inquiry,” as totally blaming 100% of a problem on something, you are welcome to. And perhaps, he was intentionally misrepresenting his position and he does believe that it’s 100% responsible. But the literal meaning of his words are essentially the opposite of blaming “100%."
And if you read my objection to your misrepresentation of the obvious meaning of his words, as putting me in the 100% camp, this suggests that you are misreading what people are saying by assuming that any questioning of the views you hold dear, automatically relegates the person to the exact opposite political position of your own.
Rather than taking Abe’s point as an attack on opponents, I think we might reasonably take his lines of inquiry as Kahneman-style systematic errors of thought to which we all might be subject. To take those ideas seriously, we’d need more evidence than we have, but I’d consider them worth some thought. I have seen the dumb-dumb head and he is me.
The fact that in the entire period since 1989, there have only been three years when a majority of Americans didn’t think crime was increasing, suggests that this sort of bias is a really important part of any explanation of perceptions! (And interestingly, 2025 was one of those three years, when only 49% of people thought crime was increasing.)
Even if their takes are not based on evidence, and the absolute crime rate really is going down, have you considered that this rising anger and resentment can be politically utilized to take more decisive action against crime? We do not need to settle for the levels of crime we have now, and this narrative is helping to create support for solutions.
If you think in terms of “solutions” you’re setting yourself up for perpetual disappointment. I think it’s better to ask for clear eyed evaluation of the problems that exist so we can try to make them better, rather than using a false narrative of decline to drive focus that you hope will completely eliminate a problem that likely can never be eliminated.
Obviously 0 crime is unrealistic, and no one is seriously asking for that. But there are countries that do not have anywhere near the problem we do, so major improvements are absolutely possible. Unfortunately, many of the solutions are not possible in a society where otherwise productive people are going out their way to defend the dregs of society, so narratives like the one we see here are necessary for changing public sentiment.
You can also politicize anger and resentment to create support for an oppressive police state and compete loss of liberty. If it's possible to create the impression that crime is high despite it being low, then there is nothing to stop an ever tightening ratchet eventually depriving us of all liberty.
People have always been getting older. My sense is that “the media and social media” are presenting crime as out of control now more than it did say 15 years ago. I guess maybe the media sources I’m aware of are changing their target demographic as the people aware of them grow up?
People have always been getting older, and people have always been sure that we are in the middle of a surge in crime rates. Unlike the vibecession, the vibe crime wave is a permanent phenomenon.
I am loving this entire series and the theories spinning out of it. Is it possible crime and disorder are just the Next Problem?
People in Bangladesh still gladly take jobs at sweatshops that have been known to have many deaths, not because they are unaware or unafraid of death, but because this risk is background noise for their current set of risks and problems. Meanwhile a suburban retiree I know spent two years being angry and lobbying the city to restrict traffic on his already quiet street because he was convinced everyone was speeding. To put it bluntly, the people in Bangladesh have other problems to worry about and the suburban retiree does not. People today have fewer problems and more comfortable lives than people 50 years ago - but while their ability to get entertainment on demand is up 1000%, crime and disorder are only down 20%. They now have both the time and mental space to worry about this.
This is the reality of economic growth also: if productivity is good in one area, but doesn’t improve relative to other sectors, that sector will increasingly feel expensive and burdensome.
This mirrors my thinking about this. The benchmark/expectation for social order and comfort is just wayyy higher because we live in a situation of unbelievable comfort and affluence by the standards of the vast majority of humanity in the past and many in the present.
People today have fewer problems... depends on where you live, skinny. I hear we have these things called Wild Boar these days, and that you don't actually stop them without a gun... I drive through rural Appalachia, and they post on pharmacies "no opoids here."
Yes. For example the actual filth of America's city streets is objectively much lower than the historic comparison of the same city with horse-based travel, limited indoor plumbing, limited garbage collection, and almost no social or legal prohibition on littering. But now I see one pile of dog poop or McDonald's bag thrown out a car window and I am furious, because my expectations have been elevated. And I can go to very specific parts of Europe or Asia and see that it is possible to put all trash in the right place, and I don't have to go to other places so I can disregard counter-examples.
It's also an inequality story, combined with America's unusual combination of class views. We have the wealthiest people ever to exist living in SF and NYC directly adjacent to smelly guys who don't even own a tent and whose daily routine consists of shoplifting deodorant to sell so they can buy drugs. In many prior states of the world, the wealthy individuals might address similar scenarios with one of the following coping strategies:
a) My, this city is chaotic and filthy! I shall retire to my vast country estate and put it out of mind.
b) Of course the poor are disgusting, but that is merely one of the many ways in which they are inferior to me. I shall instruct my servants to kick them until they relocate somewhere out of my line of sight (to some nightmarish asylum or gaol if need be) and then meditate on how I deserve the finest things due to a combination of unique talent, hard work, and God's favor.
c) The plight of these downtrodden individuals is a shame and an injustice! As an early altruist who lacks a global frame of reference, let me grab the low-hanging fruit of building this city's first public hospital, shelter or soup kitchen and actually improving their material condition in a way that is immediately visible and gives me warm feelings.
None of these coping strategies is available to anywhere near the same degree to today's wealthy urbanites. This experience is frustrating and gets converted into complaining about crime and disorder. It's not because there's measurably more countable bad stuff than 1990, but because the contrast sticks out more and it's clear that there's not a viable path to avoid it or manage down to a comfortable level.
> This experience is frustrating and gets converted into complaining about crime and disorder. It's not because there's measurably more countable bad stuff than 1990, but because the contrast sticks out more and it's clear that there's not a viable path to avoid it or manage down to a comfortable level.
Wait, I was following you right up until here.
Why ISN'T there a viable path to avoid it or manage it down, when most of the rest of the world manages this seemingly impossible task handily, with much lower productivity and GDP per capita than any American city?
Isn't that what most of this debate is about? One side thinks it should be possible, points to the rest of the world, and says "well?" And then the other side tries to handwave and say it's obviously impossible, because...something something culture war stuff?
And now Scott is coming in and is like "actually you're BOTH wrong! It's not even a problem! The homeless tent cities, the syringes and crap on the streets, everything being locked up in stores? All fake! That's why it's impossible, it's not even a problem! You guys are just a bunch of ungrateful whiners, enjoy your rigorously measured and verified lower crime!"
But in real life, the rest of the world still exists, and stands as a huge contrast to every Tier 1 US city, at much lower GDP per capita values. This is a problem that is eminently solvable by SOMEBODY, just not the current people in charge.
My own personal conceit?
We should give the "problem homeless" all the free drugs, alcohol, and food and water they want, out in the middle of nowhere away from all the productive people.
If you do the math, any one of the increase in core downtown usability / values, lower policing need, or lower resulting crime would pay for the entire program several times over, and the combined benefit is 4-20x larger annually than the projected costs.
Will it ever happen? Probably not, because it involves giving homeless people free drugs, and apparently neither side can abide that idea, and prefer the tent cities, syringes, and human crap everywhere.
If you're pointing at other countries that have apparently solved the problem wouldn't it make more sense to also copy their solutions and institutions rater than going with a politically impossible idea?
I mean, I'll do you one better, I'm actually an expat who fled one of our tent city pleasure domes for more functional East Asian cities.
I bring up the politically impossible idea, because part of what people claim for American Exceptionalism, and a very clear root cause of all the problems, IS the problem homeless population. Other cities supposedly don't have to deal with them, and so any American solution needs be sui generis, and it would solve that problem while being hugely net positive economically, socially, and also for the homeless people in the sense they would happily opt into it.
I’m with you completely, would also vote for less nice solutions. However there is no political will to do any of this at the state, local or federal level. The block of voters paying closest attention is against things like clearing tents off busy public streets. Another big contingent is against spending any money on homeless people even if the program is net profitable vs status quo. Another big contingent thinks there is no problem. Another big contingent thinks the problem is entirely about race or immigration and can’t see all the white native-born fent zombies. Just totally hopeless to make large progress as an individual who observes reality and proposes pragmatic solutions. Therefore people get very frustrated.
I think there's abundant political will; it's just that it's roughly evenly split between two approaches that conflict, and so their advocates spend most of that will on obstructing the opposition.
It could be that there's a growing third approach that despairs of the first two and has chosen apathy, but I don't think we're set up to accurately tell how big it is.
Yeah one of my hypotheses is that people are getting "softer" faster than they're actually getting soft. I wonder how wartorn immigrants perception compare to natives.
In the UK at least, I think it's partly that people are talking about different things when they mean crime and that certain "new" crimes have increased, and are also unpunished.
Shoplifting in London has *doubled* and it's partly a very specific method where gangs go in, take a bunch of things and then walk out. Staff are instructed not to stop them.
Phone snatch theft is way up.
These are crimes that basically didn't exist in 2010. We just don't notice that mugging or subtle shoplifting has fallen.
It's this feeling of criminals acting with impunity that really contributes to the overall decay feeling. Similarly there was a lot of outrage over an increase in people barging through ticket barriers on the London Underground. Maybe fare evasion hasn't changed, but the methods have.
My impression as an American is that crime in the UK peaked in the late 20th Century. For example, I went on a business trip to a leafy suburb of Oxford in 1994, where my fellow marketing researchers spent the entire lunch hour recounting how their cars had been stolen.
Many crimes have got a lot harder. Cars are harder to break into and drive away (unless you have the right tech). Lots of CC TV, door cameras etc. So there's less opportunity for casual crime: it now requires preparation.
On the other hand (in the UK anyway) the expectation that any wrongdoer may be carrying a knife means you're very unlikely to get challenged.
So crime is more brazen and this may be what people notice.
You are correct re: shoplifting, I also feel like there's been a huge move towards smaller versions of supermarkets, which are not as easy to defend as big supermarkets and the owners don't care as much as they would their own corner-shop.
Something is being overlooked here. An unpleasant environment is being detected by people who live in the United States, but it is not exactly "disorder" in the sense above.
Rather, due to mass immigration of various peoples from foreign cultures, the (usually white) Americans who had previously lived in places where even the disorder was at least in expected forms to them now often move around in neighborhoods that, though maybe more orderly than before, are "ordered differently" according to the mores of a different people. This is understood/recieved as disorder by those who are accustomed to pre-mass-immigration American society.
The "disorder" that people are complaining about is the presence of large communities of people with very different cultures next to each other. A multitude of languages and customs in areas with massive populations of very different origins is not as measurable as litter or graffiti, but may be even more unpleasant as one cannot sympathize as easily with the source of the disorder, even if they're not doing anything particularly disorderly at the moment.
Also, when people talk about the character of a neighborhood as a proxy for its ethno-racial composition, I think this is what they are experiencing.
Ok... the above comment is not about crime though, or even disorder as it is normally understood. What I am saying is that the very presence of large communities of immigrants with foreign customs in cities is what causes white Americans to perceive an increase in disorder. I am not saying that immigrants are the main cause of crime or even that immigrants cause "objective" disorder (like littering, graffiti, and shoplifting listed by Scott).
Then why are the complaints about crime and disorder and not the presence of foreign cultures? I mean, people do complain about foreign cultures but why does it also cause them to complain about crime and "objective" disorder when those have not increased?
This is for the reason described in Scott's third paragraph. People do not, at least in many social spheres, complain about foreign cultures insofar as they are foreign.
The social project to make "racism" the worst crime you could commit (for certain definitions of racism) was *fantastically* successful.
Very few people, outside of a few protected sectors of academia, think crime is actually good. So if you're bothered by your culture changing (and you're the only group where it's not socially acceptable to directly complain about your culture changing), you resort to calling it crime and disorder instead.
Think of it les on an individual level and more on a "society in aggregate level". Consider the margin, people who absent a pressure would be marginal over whether to "say it as it is" or to "euphemistically lie". Now place moderate to high pressure on the societal norms in that culture that "say it as it is" gets socially punished and "euphemistically lie" does not.
You're going to push people over the margin.
The higher the pressure, the more get pushed over that margin. Perhaps enough (perhaps easily enough) to explain the effect of "I'm seeing a lot more complaints about 'crime and disorder' than I used to even though crime has gone down and disorder seems stable".
You can blame any given individual for lying rather than keeping their mouth shut.... but you can't expect hundreds of millions of people not to respond to incentives. They're always going to move people at those margins in bulk in a way that is "understandable in aggregate, if not really forgivable individually". For the bulk of those people they wouldn't even really see it as lying so much as "expressing my concerns in a way that conforms to the way my society prefers those concerns to be expressed".
If you mean homogenously mixed communities, the mores do not come into play here because they require interactions. If you are referring to the Great Migration of African-Americans, the issue there was not mores but actual crime. African-Americans have some distinct customs and attitudes in comparison with other Americans but far less so than, say, Indians, who contribute to society quite admirably, but make it take on the character of *their* society rather than the American society of the period before mass immigration.
I don't know the statistics on this, so you could be right on the facts (however we want to define "vicious crimes"). But your comment seems to hint at policy which I think is unethical and racist. At least it doesn't sound like it's gonna be "better education". So I second Nadav's question: What do you propose?
We've had three periods in my lifetime in which liberals held the upper hand in criminal justice policy: the Warren Court Era, the Ferguson Effect, and the Floyd Effect. All three led to explosions in crime, especially black on black murder.
So, first thing: Let's learn from that unfortunate experience and Not Do It Again.
Second thing: We've seen New York City radically reduce its murder rate by focusing on point-of-use gun control to change the culture of criminals: make lowlifes more afraid of the cops than of each other, so they leave their illegal hand guns at home.
It shouldn't be that hard to learn from the world's most famous city.
Also, this kind of discussion feels strange to me: "Which group of people commits the worst crimes?" Like, the group "gang members" is surely high up on that list, but that's not helpful. If you determine currently arriving immigrants from a particular country commits notably more crimes (and that's all you care about), I suppose you could "solve" the issue by restricting immigration from that country. But what do you do about a group, any group, of citizens who commit a lot of crimes? And how do you determine which groups are relevant? We know young men commit disproportionately many crimes, for instance, and thats a population thats not going to disappear, ever. And if you start going by a groups ethnic origin, you land in very dark eugenicsy waters very quickly. Unless genetics has nothing to do with it, in which case you're back to the general question of what causes crime and how to adress that, which I think is the sensible question to ask and to guide policy for everyone.
Most people still favor American Eugenics laws. do you not, sir? If not, will you advocate for a retard, unable to understand how sex makes babies, having and attempting to care for her child?
Deporting illegal immigrants can have some good effects, but it won't have much affect on America's notoriously high gun homicide rate, which is largely due to African-Americans whose ancestors have been here on average about ten generations.
It's not widely understood how much lower the Hispanic homicide death rate is than the black death rate -- Latinos die about 22% as often by homicides as African Americans, even though Latinos and blacks are roughly comparable in income and education.
That blacks die by homicide 4 to 5 times as often as Hispanics, 10 times as often as whites,, and 16 times as often as Asians, suggests there is something very wrong with African-American culture and that blacks ought to do something about their culture.
But that's not a conversation many people want to have.
African immigrants (not including Somalians) tend to have rather different culture. One might hope for Garett Jones' "spaghetti assimilation" to occur by which they transmit their less homicidal culture, but I don't know that there's any evidence for that.
It's an important question, but there are methodological problems with using self-identification for figuring out the trajectory of the next generation of immigrants from Africa. For example, say there are two 19 year old fraternal twin brothers. The one who self-identifies as an Ibo is more likely to be a Pre-Med. The one who self-identifies as Black is more likely to be an Aspiring Rapper.
Once you see this, you can't unsee it. Rightists will talk about the horror of diversity, the decline of America's white majority, the "third-worlding of America" and all the examples involve pre-65 American blacks. In addition to the falsity of it, it's politically shortsighted. The Sikh laundry-owner who minds his own business and doesn't like crime, LGBT-stuff in schools, etc is made into an enemy while GOP attempts to appeal to blacks mostly fail.
Deporting illegal aliens would reduce littering, drunk driving, and similar quality of life problems. But it wouldn't have much effect on America's high murder rate, which is majority black.
Vancouver, BC has a very large number of people from Hong Kong on the streets and I’ve never heard a single person complain about this other than worry that it’s driving up house prices.
Bad Cattitude has an article about Second World that's worth reading. You aren't getting Somali "culture" when you get a Somali rapist here. Or a Turkish rapist. Muslim countries generally punish rape quite harshly).
What you're getting is new immigrants convinced they're the top dog because you're too weak to tell them no. Committing crimes, not of passion, but of primacy. Because that's how their culture works, when they're top dog (which they ain't at home).
I suspect there's a lot of truth to this -- any sort of culture shock situation is emotionally threatening because there's the risk of social interactions going awry. In the US in recent years, other than dealing with the truly insane, there is little risk of petty social problems being dangerous, but you don't have to go very far into the past when people were killed due to social conflicts. I doubt that people perceive the fish-out-of-water sensation as being directly dangerous, but I expect that it raises some sort of baseline anxiety level that causes anything that is potentially dangerous to seem more so.
> When people complain about these things, they risk getting called a racist
I don’t see how complaining about these things is racist, unless you also explicitly bring up the race of the people involved while complaining and open yourself up to accusations that way. Indeed, if someone else associates these complaints with race when you made no reference to it, ISTM that says something about their own biases. Is this maybe a US cultural thing of some sort I am missing?
African-Americans die by homicide an order of magnitude more than white-Americans, 15 to 20 times as often as Asian Americans, and 4 to 5 times as often as Hispanic-Americans.
…but Scott doesn’t mention any of those races in that statement! He doesn’t even mention homicide:
“Disorder takes many forms, but its symptoms include litter, graffiti, shoplifting, tent cities, weird homeless people wandering about muttering to themselves, and people walking around with giant boom boxes shamelessly playing music at 200 decibels on a main street where people are trying to engage in normal activities. When people complain about these things…”
There’s a leap being made that is not justified by the text. Which is where I came in.
it's entirely justified, as multiple comments have said. Guess I need to add another one. In America, when you complain about urban disorder, people call you racist. Source: I live in this country.
Ana Kasparian's "how I left the left" story prominently features an incident where she got sexually assaulted by a homeless man, and when she complained about it to her friends afterwards they called her a racist, even though she had not mentioned his race and in fact the man was white. You can try to pull the reverse-Uno card of calling people like this racist in turn, but it rarely works.
Where do you live? In most countries I'm familiar with the people behaving anti-socially tend to be minorities.
What happens is that people are uncomfortable with this fact so a taboo forms around talking about it. The way this taboo is enforced is by accusing people who breach it of bigotry.
The larger the gap is between observable reality and what you're allowed to say in polite company the stronger this taboo must necessarily be. In the United States it's exceptionally strong so people are easily provoked into accusations of racism.
I would suggest that antisocial behavior by the majority is done under color of law (e.g. masked agents invading Minneapolis) and not characterized as antisocial. If one does characterize majority behavior as antisocial, they are dismissed as a radical to maintain the illusion that antisocial behavior is a characteristic of minority groups of various kinds.
Krischstallnacht was hardly done under the color of the law. Neither was the latest episode of driving around in Tanks in South Africa. Now, you might say the brownies in the tanks aren't "the majority" because they aren't black... but the rioters were hardly under the color of the law either.
Is it possible that your understanding is colored by the First World?
Because burning down the government in Sri Lanka was also done by the majority....
My comments re: SF shoplifting experience as one of the rare ACX readers who bags groceries for a living are already on file in previous posts. So I'll just add confirmation that, yes, at my store location we still see increased shoplifting compared to The Before Times. It's just an ordinary part of the workday now, no more remarkable than getting Karened or bitched at for meat shortages we have no control over. But, and this is important: prevented shoplifting is definitely not something we report! Some employees just have a well-developed knack for spotting Problem Customers, and it's actually fairly likely boosters will relinquish their ten-finger discount if politely called out on it. (More likely if done impolitely, but we're not supposed to do that, and the people responsible have been fired. You learn the plausibly-deniable ways from seeing who gets scapegoated.) This is a notable improvement from a few years ago, where theft was significantly more brazen, and you ran a real risk of A Viral Confrontation by attempting any intervention. So rates are elevated, but still down, but down less than they appear because deterrence is a bit more effective. I don't know *why* this changed though... (Prop 36, which Scott hosted a guest post oppposing?)
And even a successfully stopped shoplifting attempt will probably have some witnesses, who may still consider it evidence of disorder, although hopefully less than getting away with it. It'd be very interesting to dive into the effectiveness of such criminality over time too: when boosters are highly competent and no one's the wiser except the accountants, the perception of disorder could actually be quite low, since no one ever sees the thefts happening! I do think this must be part of the story, since the viral spread of shoplifting-as-normative necessarily resulted in many new entrants who lacked the skills of veterans who'd quietly been doing it for years. Kids these days got no technique...but that doesn't much matter if you can't stop them anyway, which describes many of the most outrageous retail thefts. Why bother with gambits like The Service Animal Distraction, Jacket Draped Over Cart, Bag Brought From Home, Dress Like A Dangerous Professional, etc when you can just load up a Hefty 50gal and walk out unimpeded?
I should also add that we experimented for awhile with simply not carrying certain high-value items that walked off often (e.g. cosmetics, fancier liquor, bougie meats). While this does mechanically deter theft of those specific SKUs...it's not like there aren't other valuable things to steal. Strategies shift, fencing markets adjust, they'll resell Milagro instead of Tito's or whatever. Obviously as a mere grunt I don't have access to hard figures, but our most recent disappointing inventory audit disproved the thesis that high-value-item shrinkage was the main driver of our discrepancies. This implies that it's more of a "make it up in volume" type situation. We can ban repeat offenders, occasionally get the actual cops involved for the most serious incidents, reduce the maximum possible conversion rate...but as long as there's a steady trickle of New Challengers, it's gonna keep being an uphill battle. It seems genuinely hard, or at least uncomfortably expensive, to put this toothpaste back in the tube. (And yes, for the record, I'm willing to bite such bullets. This shit makes my job harder, it makes things worse for our customers, and frankly the median perp is simply not a Jean Valjean-esque sympathy case. Although I don't think the death penalty is quite appropriate, contra Scott's boombox stance.)
Physical contact is a huge no-no, that's a one-way ticket to a disciplinary writeup at minimum. But, you know, sometimes the escalator randomly shuts off when someone's trying to flee up it, and that's really weird. Or cart wheels lock up at inopportune times. We also can't directly blockade exits (like stand in front of the doors) or chase people, but sometimes you just get in the mood to take a walk outside alongside a shoplifter, you know? Get some fresh air, practice those customer service skills.
The verbal interactions have to be careful as well...we're not supposed to be directly accusatory (unless it happens right in front of our eyes), so oftentimes it's more of a Common Knowledge thing. Making them aware that you're aware that they're stealing, and you're aware of their awareness of your awareness, etc. Then it's just a matter of going up and being like, hey man, not today, yeah? Or like, hey buddy, can I get you a basket, you seem to need some help carrying a few extra items there.
It's also occasionally possible to take advantage of police presence if they just happen to be in the area for something else (or even shopping). We don't have to intimate that we called them, just note the proximity. Similarly, when it's a repeat offender (and we're very certain of that, can't afford false positives), usually the best resolution is to ask them to leave before they even attempt to steal anything, tell them they're banned. For whatever reason, there's less legal and cultural pushback to the "shopkeepers reserve the right to refuse service to anyone" thing compared to shoplifting dynamics, and if they refuse to comply then it's very easy for us to escalate to real law enforcement. Oftentimes the frustrated aspiring criminal then goes on to beclown themself in a way that further retroactively justifies kicking them out!
On a meta level, since it's SF, it's also of course highly important to hedge against any accusations of _____isms. This is one valuable aspect of having a diverse workforce, especially at the managerial level...avoiding the perception of bias is much easier if the interaction is same-race, same-sex, similar-age, and so on. Also disarms any potential defenses from the perp along the lines of Help I'm Being Oppressed.
Just by itself this comment may directly answer the sub-question "If shoplifting is flat/modestly down/modestly up, why are people citing increased shoplifting as strong evidence of increased disorder".
If the shoplifting in question changes from "Mr Pro Lifter" who steals $500 of stuff a week for years and years without ever being detected by the shop *or the general public* when doing so..... to "Mr Brazen Gang Lifter" who steals $4-5-600 of stuff a week with one big fat raid where him and his mates scoops a load of stuff off the shelves and brazenly walk out past dozens of scared shoppers and ineffectual shop security.
I think Mr Pro-Lifter doesn't alter perceptions of disorder at all.... and Mr Brazen gang Lifter if going to get thousands of employees/shoppers (over the years they operate) reporting "Disorder is off the charts, just the other day I saw....."
It could just be a change of tactics.
"Shrinkage" includes lots of avenues of loss that would not be perceived as disorder (as they are discreet) ... if "shrinkage" has switched from discreet strategies (employees pocketing items, Mr Pro Lifter) to highly public strategies (dozen person brazen raids and walkouts) you'd expect the same amount of shrinkage to lead to a widely reported increase in disorder from the thousands of people who witness the brazen raids.
I have a suspicion that what changed compared to even twenty years ago is the rise of a powerful ideological block that is loudly against cracking down on disorder. When everyone agrees that miscreants should be dealt with but disorder still happens, that codes as an unfortunate fact of life or simple government incompetence. But when there are people, who hold the greatest influence in America's biggest and most culturally influential cities, and genuinely believe that dealing with disorder and petty crime is not worth putting people in jail/ clearing encampments/ throwing the homeless out of public transportation or libraries, then it feels like disorder is a choice actively pursued by those in charge, which is much more infuriating.
There's something incredibly cruel about the position that, if you can no longer afford rent, the government should also seize your library card, or rip down the tent you've put up in a desperate attempt at shelter.
We don't have other forms of free entertainment! Everything else either requires a home or is paywalled.
The shelters won't take them, you have no experience with shelters I take it? They have complex entrance rules to include often "you have to prove you are homeless, have been for awhile, and a recent TB test .. oh and nobody with a criminal record". Takes three days just to get the PPD test read.
You are 100% wrong man, up until two years ago, I spent five years as a case manager in an emergency homeless shelter. We rejected maybe 90% of people that showed up initially and in nearly every case, because our cost reimbursable government contract required it. And then once you were in the shelter, we kicked people out all the time with with a one week "go sleep on the street" waiting period to re-apply. To get in a shelter there is a generally a thirty minute interview which covers everything from ID's to medical history to criminal background checks to immigration status to verification of your story including tracking down references that can collaborate it. And if you didn't have a proof of PPD within the past three months, well too bad so sad, stop by our nurse's office and she'll give you one and maybe we'll let you in in three days if you come back and we can read it; enjoy sleeping on the street with your kids until then.
And no this wasn't "just my shelter", we ran 95% of the shelters in the entire state and the other ones had the same policies as they were all mandated by state grant requirements.
The only "free for all" shelter in the state was ran by a farmer who would put you up in large military surplus tent with every one else, a tatami mat for the ground to sleep on with a bedbug ridden blanket, and some cold rice to eat where every one would get kicked out at sunrise and could re-enter at sunset. And almost no one went because it was far away hence transportation issues plus honestly you were better off in a box in an alley closer to all the social service support networks like homeless showers, libraries to get out of environment, soup trucks, etc.
The public has this magic fantasy of what the homeless programs their taxes pay for look like, they look nothing like you imagine and they are generally funding to reject people in need and instead provide make work jobs for social workers while allowing politicians to claim "they did something".
When people talk about homeless people in libraries, they obviously don't mean you should literally have to prove you have a roof over your head before you're allowed inside. The question is whether people should be allowed to sleep in libraries, consume drugs in them, and whether there should be minimum hygiene standards.
It's not 1998, public neighborhood libraries haven't been about children since home Internet and smart phones have became the norm for even poor people. Urban libraries for the last twenty years have been de facto daytime homeless community centers and it's the only thing that keeps them in business as every one else just uses the Internet, uses the libraries e-Book program, or uses the central research libraries which don't attract homeless people as they intentionally don't provide services homeless want like Internet access, multimedia, magazines, comfortable reading areas, pop fiction, and they strictly enforce STFU or get kicked out policies, etc .. the same reason you you don't kids there either.
This ain't Mayberry, if it weren't for the homeless we would shudder 99% of urban libraries and then you all would cry "why do we have all these homeless on the street" rather than hiding away in libraries you never visit anyways.
Nothing, just leave them as is and let them continue as politically acceptable faux homeless community centers. If we turned them into "proper" designed shelters, the homeless wouldn't go there as homeless shelters are generally hostile to the homeless. Libraries are a win win, the homeless want to be there (safety, clean, shelter, internet) AND the librarians want to keep their jobs so both parties have an interest in keeping them useful. I'd probably reallocate some of the actual book budget though to the central / research libraries while increasing the library janitorial staff and bathroom facilities.
Why can they no longer afford rent? Liberals will tell us (correctly) that there are many jobs that Americans don't want to do, and we need immigration. Do they see the contradiction between that and these kinds of beliefs?
Because you can't hold down a job, effectively you are socially disabled for lack of a better word. Also it tends to be a downward spiral, I take it you haven't rented much lately. You lose your job so you get evicted, you end up homeless, and then you cant' get a job because you are homeless and don't have an address. If you do manage to get an address, you then can't rent a place because you have no credit, your record shows you were eviction, the court has ordered 25% your pay taken as restitution should you get a job to pay off that old eviction, and no landlord is interesting in dealing with you outside predatory slumlords who are doing to charge you more than you can afford for places that are effectively inhabitable but the city, like most municipalities, has no interested in applying building codes and landlord tenant law against landlords.
If your take home is $600 a month full time minimum wage and even the cheapest dump in your city is $900, not even counting food, utilities, transportation costs to work, etc on top of the court taking, you see the problem?
> If you do manage to get an address, you then can't rent a place because you have no credit
How did this system arise? For most of human history you didn't need "credit" to rent a place, now you do. Could it have anything to do with regulations liberals put in place that made landlords reluctant to rent to the poor?
Sure a lot of this can be blamed on Progressive policies such a landlord liability for tenant actions and a duty to know your tenants but likewise Conservative WASP values are at fault as well; zoning and building codes a big problem too. But we can't blame this one on credit scores, as a lender you don't want people that are proven unreliable. The reason credit scores are even a "problem" in rental context is simply because we have a lack of supply hence landlords can afford to be overly picky.
Going back to a Substack discourse from a few months ago (or is it still burning off my feed?), let's say a homeless person exposes himself at the library. What do people expect would have happened 50 years ago? Would the good old boys beat him to death? Or would the cops do it first? What do people expect now? That you just have to helplessly avert your eyes or shuffle your kids out of the building hoping they didn't see? Whether either scenario was/is truly realistic, that's how some people have evidently come to feel about it. Even if this kind of thing happens statistically less often today than 50 years ago, perceived helplessness about it will drive more fear of it.
To be fair, that's a number one annoyance for many people. Out enjoy the beach, here come Tyrone to ruin it. Out taking a ten mile hike up a mountain, here come Nyguen to ruin it. Trying to sit on the bus and read, here comes Paco to ruin it.
It's kind of weird that you felt the need to use strongly racially-coded names, but you spread it around a little, presumably to defuse accusations of racism. Apologies if I'm reading too much into this.
No, it was intentional. It's not something American white people do in my observation, we are raised better than that. I can earnestly say I run into it multiple times a day for nearly two decades and not a single instance in all the time of a white person being the culprit.
Yeah he should have at least asked an AI if there were any complaints about homelessness or public disorder in the 1930s, and he would have found out about Hoovervilles and slum clearances and other famous transformations of urban areas during that period!
Producing obnoxious noise is a way to assert dominance in a public space. It signals the assumed ability to inflict inconvenience on others without fear of consequences. This is not about noise per se, it is about social hierarchy. So it’s a big deal.
Secular comparisons are interesting but there’s no reason why they should be a decisive metric. Crime and disorder can decrease. They are bad. In Chicago they affect everyone in the sense that there are vast areas no one feels safe in (or would feel safe in if visited). I do wonder when/where people have said “Crime is not a problem.)
No reason they should be decisive - but the issue isn’t whether people say “crime is not a problem” so much as when people are saying “crime is a more important problem than X” or “crime is a less important problem than Y”. If crime is decreasing and some other problem is increasing, but people are focusing more on crime and less on the other problem, then that should be fixed.
Your point is true to some extent but neglects the appropriate utility weighting of crime. Is there evidence that subjective utility weightings overestimate what would be best? I
The traditional news media has a direct financial interest in upsetting people. Social media has an indirect financial interest in upsetting people. And blogs like this one are dominated by people like us, who are easy to upset with objectively harmless things like public boom boxes.
It's probably a combination of several of the theories, but agree that the media/internet/culture wars seems to be missing in the conversation here.
Media has a well documented negativity bias.
Conservative politics has a "liberal cities are all overrun with chaos and crime" vibe that fits their politics and worldview and is incentivized to amplify.
Internet culture/tools allow for quicker cycling of rumors/negative anecdotes than the past, in the 50s someone told a handful of their neighbors about how they heard there were tent cities everywhere, now they can spread that on Facebook/reddit/wherever to a much larger audience.
Anecdotally I will say there was a clear bump in disorderliness here in Minneapolis in the post COVID/post George Floyd era, that has since
I think he purposefully leave this out because it's so obvious. So he's trying to find all other possible explanations before we can throw our hands and say, it's the media.
Well, when it comes to SF, I don't think you should go by the old, native population's opinion at all. Nor do I think everyone is able to distinguish well between 'lived experience' and youtube.
As someone who grew up in the Bay in 60s/70s, lived in Berkeley and SF in the 80s and 90s, and still spends much of the year there, I can assure you much of SF angst - about crime, disorder and everything else - is less a function of objective than relative decline.
The City of my youth was comparable, in many ways, only to NY. Banks, stock exchange, food/art, international culture Back then, even a 'trip to Chicago' was supposedly a trudge. San Franciscans believed it lacked restaurants and scoffed at its 'continental cuisine' and rustic ways. We were quite convinced 40 years ago there was basically little of interest in the US until you got to NYC, and, yes!, we were actually more sophisticated than New Yorker because we were somehow more European! (Funny to remember just how Europhile SF was. Even the 60s counterculture owed a lot to posh talking, pipe smoking, obviously upper class Alan Watts). Well the rest of the country caught up
Even more importantly, the rest of the bay is where the regional improvement has occurred. Places like Walnut Creek, and much of the peninsula are vastly more pleasant and interesting than they were before. If you imagine most of those people in SF everyday for work you'd have a different downtown. As it is, who needs to go downtown? I would argue its not who is there now (criminals, loiterers, drug addicts) but who isn't that makes the difference. Most of us go looking for affirmation in our daily routine as much as we do online.
Aren't ~1933-1970 the years when it was time for people born at Prohibition to commit crimes? (Wild thought, doesn't seem to be confirmed by Russian statistics, but idk, maybe there is something here)
This, and the immigration post, don't come close to doing justice to how misleading the appeal to government statistics is in some circumstances.
An autistic boy dropped a Quran in UK. The was then bullied out of school, the was sent into hiding from death threats, and the boy himself was investigated by the authorities for a hate crime. The parents tried begging forgiveness from the community with the mother wearing a hijab, while the community leaders sympathized with the attackers as an understandable reaction.
This is to say nothing of the increasingly common mass shooting (Bondi, Manchester), another that could have been the biggest one in history was stopped recently in the UK.
So statistics about violent crime don't mean jackfruit to the child in a largely Muslim school, someone wearing a kippa in public, or someone who criticizes the religion.
Is this story accurate? You have to read to the end to get a sense of what it's saying. The writing comes across as tendentious at first, and the author clearly has opinions, but if the facts are as reported, then it seems like your characterization is way off base. I'm speaking as someone who readily accepts that Islam tends to be regressive, and a big problem for Western societies.
This article is a masterclass in admitting the truth, while trying to frame it softly to lull people into complacency. The article fully admits that that a teacher was forced into hiding for showing a picture; that the origin of the mobs against the kids was from within the UK including from a Labor politician; the school suspended the kids as a result of the mobs whipped up for the kid's own safety (weasel sentence of saying that the suspension wasn't "from the *mosque's* demand" as if it wasn't coerced); acknowledges that the school couldn't host the meeting for "safeguarding reasons", and on and on.
The article tries to soothe you that it was actually the school's fault for trying to appease by calling an assembly where they said that the students were suspended for doing "awful things" to the book, which was "inflammatory"! Apparently the people threatening violence had no agency. Even in the meeting, the defense was that it didn't tear, not that violence against blasphemers is wrong, the imam who ran the meeting was pretty clear about that.
So as far as I can tell, the central point I made is correct, and that in the UK you can already have mobs whipped up at you for being accused of blasphemy. Disproving a peripheral claim I didn't make, such as whether or not there were women at the meeting, is insignificant.
>The 1930s - 1960s were a local minimum in crime and disorder of all types.
This graph is perfect, I always had the impression that all this sentiment is about nostalgia for a short golden age, not for a general historic norm. The 19th century was not more orderly than the 21st.
Moldbug back then asked, how many places could you go on "on foot and about", during the night, wearing a gold watch, safely in 1950 and in 2008? And the answer is that in 2008 fewer places than in 1950, but more places than in 1910.
So this single-handedly disproves the Neoreactionary idea that democracies just keep governing worse and worse.
>What caused this local minimum in crime? Claude suggests a combination of low Depression-era birth rates (small cohort of adolescents in peak crime years), the wartime economy and postwar economic boom, high psychiatric institutionalization rates, and “cultural and social cohesion” in the wake of WWII - but none of these explain why the trend should start in 1933, nor reach then-record lows by 1939. Nor does it explain why we should update so strongly on this unique period that we still feel cheated sixty years later when things aren’t quite as good.
I think the drop is downstream from wealth inequality and the US government making serious efforts to tackle it. FDR was a big deal and crime usually tracks with inequality in general.
It rises again before that does, but the assassinations of the 1960s and the Vietnam War did massive damage to US social cohesion.
The '90s drop doesn't fit that pattern, but I can't help but notice the period also marked the rise of the internet and video games, making the new baseline lower - it does start rising again from the Great Recession.
Disorder may be decreasing per capita, but it is so concentrated spatially that it is probably getting more visible. And people who drive by a busy intersection and see twice the number of homeless are not going to be mentally adjusting for the increase in their city's population.
Yep. The Tenderloin 30+ years ago occupied a much larger portion of the City. Back in the early 80s, when Berkeley students still did part time jobs, I worked delivering medical beds to hospitals and people in the SROs around downtown. Much of what we would have considered 'the bad neighborhood' is now fine. Similar folk, but jammed into a smaller space. (note: there was a lot more violence there back in the day. The dregs of the underclass on opiates rather than booze, speed, or crack has made a difference. More appalling looking - because so concentrated - but much less dangerous)
I don't live in the Bay Area. In fact, I live in a rural Northeast town where nobody even locks their doors. I don't even know where my house keys are rn. But I still hear people complain about crime, though it's vaguely elsewhere or sort of lurking behind the bushes ready to jump out, immigrant pedos waiting to nab their kids, that sort of thing.
As far as I can tell, it's a media diet issue. They consume a lot of media that focuses on horrible crimes committed by the type of people they already dislike.
You are so lucky. My stories from my rural coworkers is "we look at all our high school classmates in prison" and "who shot up in the walmart this week." Times are hard, lots of rural places (and that's not counting the hawgs)
True, my town is relatively affluent and progressive, full of old hippies and arty retirees and organic farmers. A nearby island is more working class and the police blotter there has a lot of drug-related arrests. Still most of those criminals are not going around robbing strangers, so the crime is relegated to local circles that the rest of us don't have much contact with. I do recall the time the guy who was installing my new propane furnace explained that he usually brings in some "junkies" to haul away an old oil tank for free because they sell the metal. I had to tell him not to bring junkies into my house!
What about the possibility of comparison? Prior to YouTube et al., most urban dwellers had little idea how other cities in other countries looked like.
Nowadays everyone can see that, say, Asian or Central European metropolises look more orderly and asks quite logically "if we are so rich, why do we tolerate so much filth when Bangkok or Kyiv can maintain nice living environment with a fraction of American GDP"?
How far do we want to go down the order hole? Seems to me we can get pretty arbitrary pretty fast.
Is men walking around with beards and long hair a form of disorder? What about people wearing pajama pants in the grocery store? People wearing un-ironed, collarless shirts and no hats?
Loud music audible from cars? Music without easily distinguishable melodies? Melodies that don't stick to one major or minor key?
People using curse words outside the bar? People using bad grammar?
Brightly colored cars? Cars with iridescent paint? Cars with more than one color paint? Cars with bumper stickers on them?
I got sick with a cold back in December, and needed the one brand of cough drops that really works (Fisherman’s Friend!), which they only have at Walgreens. I was in line behind a gentleman in very new, stylish streetwear. He didn’t speak, and didn’t understand the normal English words spoken to him by the cashier. He had some kind of bank card, and seemed to know that it had something to do with buying things, but he didn’t have any idea what to do with it. Didn’t know how to make the card and the terminal interface with each other. After a seemingly-interminable period of failed gesturing, the cashier, with an apologetic glance at me, took the guy’s card and ran it for him.
I was irritated because his ignorance unnecessarily prolonged the physical pain I was experiencing.
I wish him the best! I don’t know his story in this big beautiful melting pot of America. Sincerely, best of luck.
Two years ago, a night cleaning crew blew up our local Applebees when they accidentally cut a gas line and didn’t call emergency services because nobody on the crew spoke English. Or, you know, “language barrier” might have been code for something else, hard to know the truth in these things.
Three years ago, my friend was walking down the street. A man started following, yelling about how he was going to kill him. He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t want to do something racist, like call the police.
Six years ago, I was having brunch at an outdoor seating place. A man walked past, talking about how he was going to come back with a machine gun and spray bullets everywhere. “Just spraying”, he kept saying. “Spraying everywhere”.
They planted trees in that neighborhood. But the guys who speed down that street, engines roaring, at 3am, flattened them all. Like most of the road signs get flattened at one time or another. I actually felt the thump when one of them crashed into the retaining wall of the apartment building next door. Water spraying everywhere from the smashed hydrant.
I think you're trying to make the point that the type of disorder you are bothered by is not trivial stuff like people doing their grocery shopping in pajamas? That you have some kind of boundary around "disorder that causes material harm"? That's great.
For example my grandparents generation grew up where there were neighborhoods for each type of recently arrived European immigrant like polish, Irish, Italian.
The kids from each group formed gangs and would go fight each other, my grandpa being Italian fought with and hated poles and Irish. Then his daughter married an into a big polish family and he softened on them.
Of course, a lot of these immigrants didn’t speak English well. I mean, maybe the Irish but that one’s still a bit iffy.
In practice you just find a few things people can agree on ("we want cleaner streets" or "we should be able to dress how we like") and focus on changing those, you don't need to decide all social norms at once or based on some underlying princeple.
Yes. Those are all examples of things that raise the perceived level of public disorder.
You don't want *zero* public disorder. But the ideal amount is less than it is in most places. I would say Shibuya is about perfect. Prague is slightly too low, maybe.
What are we looking for there, then? Is preference revealed when a person is evidently willing to live in an urban center and just constantly whine about it? Or is preference revealed once the person has removed themselves to a Stepford-Wives type subdivision with $250/mo HOA fees in which no disorder is tolerated?
Sure, and I think sometimes that can be illuminating, but it's also a very imperfect way to judge what people really want. Voting with your feet requires you to find a new place to live, which can be a time-consuming process. Some people spend their whole lives wishing they could move and not moving, for various reasons, some of which are outside their control.
In general, people are messy and irrational, they often say they want one thing and do another, or do one thing but regret it, or hate something one day and not mind it the next day. I believe cognitive dissonance is the baseline state from which humans operate, not some kind of special failure mode.
I believe many complaints about disorder are actually just frustrated expressions of tribal identity.
It's not frictionless, but that also means when people DO move the reasons were enough to overcome such frictions. If we compare multiple places, we can see what factors are associated with net movement.
If people say one thing and do another, discount the "cheap talk".
I don't think it's that simple. You are treating people as acting rationally in their self-interest, based on sufficient and accurate information, even now with your concession that decisions are not frictionless. In reality people often do not act rationally in their self-interest and frequently do not act on good information. In other words, I don't think action contains as much information about preferences as you do.
We can discount cheap talk, but then we should also discount cheap action, and probably a good deal of expensive action as well.
I theorize that at the heart of most talk and action is expression of tribal identity.
Crime is an equilibrium outcome, depending on how people react to their perception of it. As such, it's hard to evaluate by just looking at crime statistics. A potentially large part of the cost of crime are these preventive measures, which hold down the increase in actual crime.
Silly example: suppose a town is assailed by a pack of werewolves that hunt every full moon. The townsfolk learn about this and institute a 5 pm curfew on full moon nights; everyone also installs silver locks on every entrance to their houses. These measures are very effective, fully neutralizing the werewolf threat. The reported (and actual) number of werewolf attacks is unchanged, yet everyone is worse off.
Or take a store who sees an increase in shoplifting. It puts everything behind locked doors, which push shoplifting back to it's previous trend. This would show as a short-lived spike in crime, but it would lead to higher costs to the store, and a worse experience for all customers.
If you want to properly measure the significance of crime, you need to measure trends in anti-theft devices, in police expenditure, in private security, etc. There are also more intangible actions that nevertheless reflect crime and disorder: avoiding certain neighborhoods at night, taking a cab rather than the subway, changing your walking route to avoid smelly areas of the city, moving to the suburbs to avoid rowdy encounters, etc.
Indeed. We used to have a world where just leaving your keys in your car was best practice, convenient for instance for double parking and emergency situations. Today, your friends would laugh at you, your insurance company would laugh at you, the police would laugh at you and the media would accuse you of entrapment.
Similarly, it used to be eminently reasonable to hitchhike to get from A to B, whereas now Norwegian police give public service announcements to discourage people from stopping for someone who seems to need help with a flat tire. The reasoning is that you are quite likely to get robbed and that this is the new status quo that we need to get used to.
If your numbers do not capture this enormous change in behavior, it says very little about the actual criminal environment and a lot about your misuse of statistics.
Similarly, it is worth to reflect on the occasional scandals flaring up about people contracting HIV from blood transfusions. These are not really going to show up in the statistics, as far as I can tell; the number of cases is dwarfed by the sexual transmissions in high-risk groups. Nevertheless, they give rise to moral panic, for good reasons.
There is a very meaningful difference between risks, whether related to STDs or crime, for which high-risk behaviors function as an "opt-in", as opposed to risks that you cannot avoid without becoming an eccentric recluse. If you shifted some part of the homicide burden from card carrying members of Fight Club to churchgoing grandmothers, I wouldn't hesitate to say crime had gotten worse.
The expression "play stupid games, win stupid prizes" is a shorthand for this. Crime which could be prevented by avoiding undesirable behaviors (like going to Fight Club) does not have the same moral worth as crime which pushes us to give up nice things worth having (like offering help without worrying for our personal safety).
(I am not sure if this is a significant effect and what would be the real examples.)
But we don't see short-lived spikes in crime followed by a return to a relatively flat baseline, we see a decline in crime rates over a scale of decades. So it can't only be explained by risk compensation.
The first chart on the page shows that despite the COVID spike, shoplifting rates are a little over half of what they were at their peak in the 90s. Why weren't stores installing locks on all their shelves in the 90s?
Two points. First, my main point is that just looking at crime rates gives you an incomplete picture - you also need to look at prevention efforts and how people react to crime, both of which are harder to measure. The fact that stores didn't use to have locks everywhere tells you something about crime levels, even if it's only how firms perceive it.
As for why stores weren't using locks in the past, one reason may be a decreased enforcement from part of the police and public prosecutors. Shoplifting small amounts is now a misdemeanor, and prosecutors conscious of incarceration rates and demographics may be reluctant to prosecute and imprison those that shoplift higher amounts. If stores perceive that the judicial system won't keep shoplifters at bay, or they are reluctant to engage with them for PR reasons, you may end up with locks in a world with overall less crime.
To further expand on this point with an extreme example, suppose that the number of people willing to commit crimes is constant over time. As society becomes richer, however, people are able to afford better crime prevention mechanisms: more secure cars, more locks in stores, more cameras everywhere, more policing, moving to safer neighborhoods and commuting longer distances, etc. This would lead to a general decline in crime rates over decades, despite the baseline levels of latent criminality being constant. Depending on the magnitude of these forces, you can both get an increase in latent crime with a decrease in actual crime, which may explain the puzzle.
Under this framework, the question is not whether there is more crime today vs 1990, but how today compares to how 1990 would look like with our current security measures.
If the reason stuff is being locked up in stores is simply because society is richer and we can afford to install more locks, then the people complaining about "public disorder" and the need to get tough on crime are completely off-base, and they should instead be yelling at the stores for installing them needlessly.
Why would installing them be needless? They serve a useful purpose. For example, as societies get richer, they spend more in health care. It doesn't follow that people complaining about "raising health costs" and the health insurance market should be yelling at people for needlessly spending money on treatments they used to do without.
I have seen no studies about this, but I would bet the willingness to pay to avoid crime is increasing in income. Being mugged in the street implies a psychological shock that goes way beyond the monetary cost of whatever was stolen, and the willingness to avoid those costs tend to be correlated to income (see, e.g. willingness to avoid queues, to avoid traffic). A society getting richer and richer would desire lower and lower levels of crime, and just being safer than in the 90s might not cut it.
If you accept the health care analogy as valid, this becomes more evident. Saying "people are healthier now than in the 90s" to someone proposing health care reform would be missing the point.
There is one very obvious explanation for statistics not matching up with people's lived experience, which is, we are not actually talking about people's lived experience.
was looking for this comment, and was going to post it myself if I didn't see it. It's the phones! It seems obvious to me that its the phones! We have systems that literally optimize for showing people terrible things all the time and we're all addicted to them!
Are there any age cohort effects going on here? I am firmly in the camp that crime is not appreciably worse than it was in decades past, but I can also attest to the fact that disorder annoys me more than it used to. When I was in my twenties, I feel like I accepted urban disorder as part of the texture of the city, something slightly thrilling. I have a certain nostalgia for a New York I never even experienced, when Times Square was full of porn theaters, the West Village was genuinely seedy, and subway cars were coated in spray paint.
Now litter maddens me, I wonder why the city can't do something about the tents that keep springing up in public parks, and I can't imagine what kind of psychopathy drives someone to listen to music in public without headphones. These problems don't seem worse to me than in the past, but my attitude seems to have shifted:
* Then: "The city is exciting, sometimes dangerous terrain that I have to be savvy to navigate, a playground that offers adventure to me and my friends."
* Now: "We're all just trying to live here, man. There are 3 million people crammed into a few square miles. Can you please not throw your fucking garbage on the ground?"
In other words, I've become an old person. Can some of the vibe shift be demographic? Not just the age of the population, but the age of people living in cities?
Likely also the composition. The city, in the archetypal abstract, used to be where you went if you were too weird for the suburbs. Now it's where a good career track deposits its cargo, and the weirdos move someplace where jobs are few and housing is cheap. How much more downtown is the Organization Man with the sitcom dad job than he used to be?
I suspect this is especially true for the right-leaning sub-segment of tech workers, which is a group that is disproportionately represented in the communities around this blog.
>Are there any age cohort effects going on here? I am firmly in the camp that crime is not appreciably worse than it was in decades past, but I can also attest to the fact that disorder annoys me more than it used to.
Frustration tolerance is a skill, and technology significantly decreases it. Everything looks bleak compared to the simulacrum.
As to the highly specific boombox question, I always assumed that was mostly an '80s phenomenon. Everyone seems to be listening to their own earbuds, in their own little world, in my travels. Portable speakers are even easier to...port, though! Is there a resurgence of loud music inflicted on everyone else? (There were two guys who did some subway acrobatics while I was in New York a couple of weeks ago, and they may have played music, but they were generally entertaining and such a soft sell that it largely felt like a positive experience.)
But it’s also objectively basically negligible compared to what it was in the 80s or 90s! There’s a reason he needs to use the quaint name to describe the problems!
I have no proof, but I'm pretty sure all of the high volume boom box playing in my Seattle neighborhood is how drug dealers make themselves known. If you need drugs, listen for the boom box.
In my neck if the woods headphones are out for poor people, boom boxes and speaker phones (to watch Tiktok everywhere) is the norm to assert their dominance.
One thing you didn't take into account is crime avoidance.
Robberies are down because people don't carry cash. Kidnappings are down, because parents monitor their kids all the time. Murders are down because people learned to avoid bad neighborhoods and not walk alone at night. and shopliftings are down because valuables are locked.
Compare this to places where "we don't even need to lock the doors".
The price we pay to *avoid* crime could be very high even though crime is down.
It would make sense for Scott to tabelate business expenses on security over the years. Good security prevents a lot of crime, especially with today's tech, thus confounding the crime stats.
It is a bit insane that shampoo is now locked away in the US. Most countries in the world don't do that. Expensive gadgets, yes, but shampoo?
It is really hard to check, also those effects could stay fir a long time after the crime stopped. I mean, if you built suburbs for people feeling from the cities to avoid crime, the suburbs still atay there even after there is no more crime on the cities.
> It would make sense for Scott to tabelate business expenses on security over the years.
I tried to do this, but it's pretty hard - most of the companies that deal with retail security / countertheft measures (Sensormatic, Checkpoint Systems, Nedap, Gatekeeper) are non-public or are small divisions of larger public companies.
The two I could find show directionally strong revenue growth:
Checkpoint Systems, a provider of NFC tags, hardware, and other antitheft measures, acquired by parent company - CCL Industries (CCL.B) for $500M when CCL was worth ~$1.5B in 2016:
People aren’t very good at crime avoidance because they worry about imaginary risks like their children being kidnapped when they’re far more likely to lose a large amount of cash to fraud, like phishing scams.
It is true that robberies and burglaries are not as profitable in the past. Part of the issue is also abundance. No one breaks in to a house to steal televisions or stereos or even desktop computers, not worth the hassle. There has been a large uptick in people stealing cellphones and laptops, but that is often simple pick pocketing or bag snatching from unobservant people with no violence involved. In general nonviolent crime has gotten more lucrative in the 21st century and violent crime less lucrative.
Your children being kidnapped is a lot more scary than losing a large amount of cash to fraud. I get your point, but a somewhat fairer comparison might be, "people worry about their children being kidnapped instead of their children being hit by a drunk driver."
"Avoid places where sketchy individuals congregate, especially after dark," is both intuitive and probably efficient, when it comes to reduction of muggings, assaults etc.
That is not an imaginary risk, an average perp of such street crimes is a junkie in a need of cash.
I agree that other sorts of crimes don't get nearly as much attention as they should, but we are still animals living in vulnerable bodies and physical security matters to us, because it mattered to untold generations of humans and apes before us.
I don’t think people are avoiding cash for crime avoidance - for most people, we avoid cash because getting cash is an annoying errand that you don’t actually need to do to live an ordinary life the way you used to.
I don’t think people are any better at avoiding bad neighborhoods than they used to - murder is just down! It’s not like the number of people passing through bad neighborhoods has decreased, and thus would-be murderers have fewer potential targets.
On the kidnapping point I can’t say for sure - parents have in fact gotten a lot more paranoid than they used to be.
Probably it's just salience -- crimes goes down yet people see crime more often due to algo feeds and following the news 24/7 . Cf. Smartphone theory of everything
Am I missing something, or are many of your non-crime signs of disorder... actually crimes? Or does your locality not have laws against theft, vandalism, littering, and being a public nuisance?
Moreover there is a sense in which people just get away with things. We hear more about white-collar crime than we used to. ~nobody went to prison for the GFC. And "fewer people are affected by crime" is untrue for any kind of defrauding of the government. If your tax dollars went to Feeding Our Future, you didn't get to keep your money and it didn't help you indirectly via beneficial government services either.
This confuses me too. I mean some of it is subjective but by what reasonable standard is shoplifting not a crime? Honestly, I'm not even particularly angry at criminals or disorderly people, but I'm absolutely perplexed and thoroughly disturbed by the whole "crime doesn't exist" crowd.
>Or does your locality not have laws against theft, vandalism, littering, and being a public nuisance?
TBF Scott lives in/near San Francisco, so if they ever had those laws they've been rarely if ever enforced for decades, and they might well be off the books entirely.
We should also remember that Scott is if not exactly progressive himself, surrounded by progressives, and to a rough approximation no, progressives do not consider any of those things crimes.
Do you think there is more defrauding of the government now than there used to be? I don’t have a clear sense of how you would track this, especially since many do the records that would be relevant for identifying fraud didn’t exist in past decades (which makes it hard to know how much fraud actually occurred).
Ghislaine Maxwell is still jailed for trafficking underage girls to Jeffrey Epstein. It is possible that she also procured for people other than Epstein, but that wasn't established in her trial. Mostly because it wasn't necessary; the procuring-for-Epstein part alone was uncontroversial, easy to prove, and sufficient to put her away essentially for life.
For anyone confused by this response, I deleted the paragraph this is an attempted answer to, because I realized it was more likely to cause tangents rather than responses focusing on the point.
>Moreover there is a sense in which people just get away with things. We hear more about white-collar crime than we used to. ~nobody went to prison for the GFC.
I see this as a medieval peasant mindset. A bad thing happened, it's an injustice that nobody went to prison for it. Maybe witches didn't cause the famine?
I agree, I found this comment confusing. The fact that some people are willing to completely ignore that these are crimes and not do any enforcement to prevent them probably goes a long way to explaining why so many other people have a perception that crime is up and the West is falling. People sometimes say, “well those are just ‘quality of life’ crimes,” as if no one should be bothered by their quality of life decreasing. The last time I was in San Francisco, you could go to a burrito place in the Mission and there would be like 50 people outside doing drugs and selling shoplifted goods. Those are crimes, everyone knows it’s happening, and unless the situation has changed drastically since October, no one’s doing anything about it. I keep hearing about how much better things are under Mayor Lurie which really makes me wonder how bad things were before.
When people say, “well things were worse in the early 1990s/1970s New York City,” I wasn’t around back then so that’s not the comparison that’s most readily available to me. What I’m comparing against are Asian cities in developed countries like Seoul, Taipei, Tokyo, Singapore, or Beijing. None of these cities has nearly as much obvious crime going on as San Francisco. Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam also looks and feels much better than San Francisco, at least in the tourist areas, despite being much poorer.
There are also seem to be a lot of people in these comments who are unconvinced that there’s a connection between high shoplifting rates, and businesses locking up nearly everything, which obviously adds costs and drives away customers. It seems pretty obvious to me why this is happening but the prevailing ideology must be pretty strong here.
3 lines of inquiry id be interested in your consideration of:
1. The hypothesis of less lead in our lives leading to less instances of crime, mental illness, and disordered behavior. I suppose the first step is to determine if the rate of crime/disordered behavior is in fact decreased, and then testing this hypothesis.
2. Same as above, is there an association with declined birth rate (as precipitated by increased birth control and access to abortions) and less disordered/crime? Hypothetically, as the actual birth rate approaches preferred birth rate at the individual level, those children that ARE conceived & born will have more resources to support them, better outcomes including education and gainful employment. (And less likely to be disordered).
3. Is there a way to consider amount of prison population /convictions of lower crimes as a price here? (Trespassing or burglary crime statistics?) in my area general property crime seems lower than over.
I’d like to see the levels of crime and disorder over time juxtaposed with the amount of resources dedicated to preventing crime and disorder.
My sense is that the US is fifty or so years into a very expensive general public project to fix crime and disorder. All the social workers, psychological studies, expensive programs, interventions, policy changes, public health initiatives, etc. It seems like the intellectual class has taken a lot of money and power and promised, in exchange, to solve these problems, and it hasn’t. Disorder stings more when you’ve been made to sacrifice to address it, and it’s still there.
In the grid formed by the possible answers to the questions “are there problems?” and “are you paying to fix the problems?” it seems like we’re in the worst quadrant. The people complaining are trying to generate political will to push us into another quadrant.
My town became the center of one such story and I was shocked to discover how many thousands of youtube channels and podcasts there are driving non stop coverage of any story that gets on their radar. That's not going to show up in data or even the front page of the paper, but having an ever growing subgenre of media dedicated just to highlighting crime stories seems like a good candidate for impacting the vibes.
I think there is something to this. Personally, I don't consume audio or video content related to crime (or most topics that aren't related to my hobbies), and I don't see any increased crime or disorder problem. It helps that I live in a nearly crime-free superb and mostly visit low-crime areas of the nearby cities (NYC, Philly). I think the same is true for most of my friends and neighbors.
I was in the same boat (didn’t consume any crime related content, lived in a safe suburb, county murder rate around 1 per 100k), so when this murder happened down the road from me I was quite taken aback to discover exactly how many content creators dedicate hundreds of hours of streaming time to cases in small towns if they catch wind of them. Doing some digging, they seem to just move around the country focusing on different unusual crimes, making them sound as sensational as possible. I did some digging on the stats and the audiences here tend to be quite loyal, share their favorite creators widely, and ultimately drive a lot of mainstream media coverage. It’s a problem I’ve become quite fascinated by now that I’ve seen it up close!
Great discussion, but two questions: first, who are these “people” you reference? I think that plays a major role in this discussion. Second, what about the role of media? Sure newspapers have always focused on crime but we didn’t carry them around all day and night and stare at them like we do our phones.
And on top of that, phones don’t just show people whatever crime story is optimized for the front page - they show people the crime story that is optimized to catch that person’s attention.
I'm going to suggest that anxiety about crime is a proxy for more generalized economic anxiety. This anxiety has two components, one rational, one emotional. First, when people are living paycheck to paycheck and carrying a growing debt load, a single instance of car theft or credit card fraud has the potential to seriously destabilize their lives. Even porch piracy can do real damage to family finances. So crime is more feared even if it's not more frequent. Second, the more people worry about falling into poverty, the more eager they are to signal their middle class status, and that includes expressing concern about crime. It's a way of letting people know that you have something worth stealing. I think it was either bell hooks or someone bell hooks was interviewing who said that the only churches that are growing within the African American community are what the rest of us call the prosperity gospel churches, the ones that promise earthly affluence to those who stay right with God.
To test this hypothesis, I suppose you'd look at layoffs and businesses closing, the length of time a job lasts before it disappears, plus the frequency of news stories about mass layoffs, which can have an effect on economic anxiety generally.
I'm enough of a natural skeptic to suspect that the numbers have been cooked, in part because they just don't FEEL right. Pretty subjective, but I trust my senses because they've worked well so far.
Around these parts the incidence of sketchy characters roaming about is WAY up. The metric is pretty foolproof: I walk to and from work every day, and regularly encounter them now, whereas this happened basically never just ten years ago. If you leave your car unlocked, guaranteed it will be searched by someone in less than 24 hours. That would not have been the case just a few years ago. Fifteen years ago, about once a month I'd see some guy drive by and think: I bet that guy works for the cartels. Now it's a couple times a week. Subjective impressions for sure, but I'd put money on their being accurate.
Another thing is the general increase in hostile encounters, not necessarily criminal in nature, often having a racial component. I wrote about one of them here on Substack not too long ago.
To a skeptic the low numbers feel like a case of "Don't believe your lying eyes." Things are great, vote for us!
But if those numbers are accurate, that's a good thing, and it should alter our thinking. Maybe there's hope after all.
>Another thing is the general increase in hostile encounters, not necessarily criminal in nature, often having a racial component.
Yeah, I think there's a missing factor or two in the *types* of murder being up/down, and how people interpret specific risks, and how they account for specific risks.
If murder overall is down but "crazy guy on public transit" murder is up, the stats will look good while the vibes (and transit use) get worse.
No, I'm saying that the figures are at odds with what my senses are telling me, rightly or wrongly. There are plenty of people reporting a similar experience. Furthermore if you are a skeptical sort, it might seem odd to you when a bunch of disconnected trends are suddenly all moving in the same direction for no readily apparent reason, in spite of other indicators. That doesn't mean it isn't real. It just gets your attention.
I'm fairly sure that there is a great deal of under-reporting of crime in some circles. I'll fall back on the example of the immigrant community near my own neighborhood. Crime stats for this area are officially fairly low. But I have known people who have lived in that neighborhood who say crime is out of control, and they would know because it affects them personally. I have personally experienced what can only be described as menacing behavior, so this resonates. What's probably happening is that most people don't report crimes because "snitches get stitches" or worse. It's their own form of Omerta.
"Suddenly?" The data in the posts goes back several decades.
>What's probably happening is that most people don't report crimes because "snitches get stitches" or worse.
Why would "snitches get stitches" result in a drop over multiple decades? Are the gangs getting progressively better and better at stopping people from answering the NCVS?
I see a sharp drop post covid. In the context of multiple decades, that qualifies as suddenly as for the second point, you are leaping to contest a point I did not make. Read it again.
How about this? White people write most of the articles about crime while black people are more likely to be a victim of crime. So the perception of crime is correlated to the number of articles about crime not the actual crime, and the number of articles about crime is correlated to the number of white people in proximity to crime rather than the actual crime rate.
White flight --> fewer white people in proximity to crime, media somewhat understates the disastrous nature of the crime wave in the 70s - 90s
Gentrification --> more white people in proximity to crime, media begins to talk more about crime even as it's falling, perceptions of crime increase
I would argue that recent policy trend has been toward things like bail reform, ending three strikes laws, and so on which are not likely to decrease crime. It is interesting that these coincide with people feeling like crime is increasing
Am I missing something here? To me it seems like this could be explained by a difference between "risk" and "hazard"? Basically, potential problems (hazards) are still there but people found ways to avoid them (i.e., reduce the risk). For example thieves would still steal cars, but now we lock them so they can't be stolen. Nonetheless, we know (or we think) that the moment we'd keep them open, they would be easily stolen. Therefore it doesn't make us feel safer in a general sense.
Earbuds or headphones definitely. Rarely do I encounter someone using a boom box on the train these days, but I don’t spend a lot of time on the trains so maybe I’m missing something.
The simplest theory I have is that middlebrow suburban people hate anything that isn't uniform or that has inherent conflict, and there has been a rise in the perception of disorder because
1. Political and consumer pandering to this cohort has done nothing but increase so they're the loudest voice
And related,
2. Showing these people every piece of disorder or filth even if it's literally a thousand miles away is an easy way to spook them and hold their attention for business purposes
People in the past had narrower scopes of concern and didn't have a consumer society to tell them that everything is supposed to be exactly within their expectations at all times.
The most noticeable change in my life is the increase in items locked away at retail stores for anti-theft. Based on anecdotes, that has increased dramatically over the past 6 years.
I can't find good data or explanations on why it's happening. I'd be interested if anyone has a good insight if the phenomenon is widespread and its causes.
On the previous post there were some comment threads about this. My synthesis of that discussion is:
1. It might be a response to increased shoplifting, but only partly. The decision to implement the locking mechanisms is made by fallible humans with imperfect information.
2. It is probably also a result of there being fewer employees within retail stores.
3. It is probably also a result of technological innovations that make it easier to lock things up without having to rearrange the whole store.
When people say crime is increasing, I think they just mean the *cumulative* amount of crime is increasing. Which is trivial, but it's also a demand that you go look directly at what they don't like: crime itself, not crime-related derivatives.
When people see crime and disorder, they feel bad, and they complain. Especially when it seems unnecessary and tolerated.
It's the same with inflation. People aren't intuitively calculating derivatives of price increases in their heads. They just don't like price increases, especially ones that seem unnecessary and tolerated.
Maybe I’m missing something, but couldn’t this just be due to the internet? People spent lots of time on their phones or on the computer. Lots of that time is spent on news sites and social media (both national and local). Both of those skew negative (lots of discussion on Nextdoor is crime-related). It feels like these factors make it so people consume many more minutes of crime-related information per day, no matter the level of crime. Might that explain this?
Yeah, I think also there could be competition among old school media to be more engaging, so it’s become more negative or flashy or something over time. Definitely an empirical question though
Here’s an anecdote, I grew up in a high crime city. When I was young I was mildly delinquent. As a teenager we all hung out at this park. Every day, that park was like a big party of teenagers. We grouped off into what activity you wanted to do. Playing basketball, skating, smoking weed, drinking, doing graffiti, playing music. It was like the social sphere. The neighbors hated it obviously. Cops would get called at night when things were rowdy, people would run, and then the next day we’d all be back there again as if nothing happened. What are you gonna do, kick a bunch of kids out of the park?
Now, whenever I return to my hometown sometimes I’ll pass the park. There’s nobody. There’s no graffiti. There are no teenagers. Nobody is playing basketball. At most there will be a family pushing their kid on the swing set.
Ok that’s more orderly. And that place really wasn’t a good influence for us kids. But honestly, I’m kind of sad for the young generations. That was a formative experience, it was like what you see in the movies of growing up in the city in the 80s and 90s (but we were ‘00s). We lived all manner of experiences there, friendship, love, fights, fun, games, everything. Now the kids in my hometown are doing less drugs and drinking, that’s great. But they’re not hanging out en masse outdoors either. And that’s kind of sad.
I think the possibility that complaining about crime leads to lower crime rates is underrated. The mechanism here would be that crime rates are sensitive mostly to cultural context, not laws or official policies. If police and other civic actors feel the heat, they have the ability to bring crime down, but often they prefer to do other things with their time and energy. So the natural cycle is that things get worse, people complain, then things get better, but people continue to complain because the complaining is functional. Then eventually people stop complaining, and the problem starts to creep back, which quickly brings back complaining.
I'm influenced here by anthropologists who point out that complaining is a way to shape expectations. For instance, the elderly among the Ju'Huansi were constantly complaining about how nobody ever helped them with anything even though objectively they were well taken care of. The anthropologist pointed out that the constant complaining was the tool used to structure cultural expectations around elder care. If they stopped complaining, the quality of care would probably go down.
The answer has to be: people are terrible at remembering trends in anything in their own lives. Nostalgia is a powerful drug, that can make the improving but still way worse 90s seem better than today.
If people are unhappy with status quo (which they should be, given the still abnormal levels of public disorder), the past will be valorized in a nonsensical way.
this, like the vibecession, is probably just another case of vibes decoupling from reality because of social media news feeds interacting with the availability heuristic
So there is probably a word for this; but when the vibe is that something is bad (and maybe getting worse) and the 'facts' are that it is really not that bad and getting better, then people tend to adjust their bias point such that it looks like things are still bad. Thus if racism is a big problem (vibe-wise) and we really see less of it, we move our needle such that more things are considered racist. The same thing might be happening with crime.
Edit: Unrelated but prohibition ended in 1933, which may account for some of the drop off in crime.
There are some areas where I think crime and crimesque things are genuinely increasing, or people's exposure to them are increasing, but they aren't what people stereotypically complain about when they complain about "crime" or call for "moar police" or what-have-you.
I'm thinking specifically of things like consumer fraud. This used to be a sporadic, rare, rip-off artist comes to your door selling trinkets sort of thing. Now it's ubiquitous; anyone who doesn't block ads aggressively is invited to part with their money on false pretenses half a dozen times before breakfast. People have to have regular conversations with their parents about emails-they-shouldn't-trust and links-they-shouldn't-click.
Other examples might be increasing public-sector corruption and the impunity of the epstein class.
But this would seem to require positing some sort of psychological deflection in which people are horrified and frightened by this ballooning fraud/corruption/elite-impunity and then sublimate that for [reasons] whereupon it reemerges transformed into a somehow-more-palatable concern about "crime in the streets." (Another option might be to find that this transformation is being deliberately engineered by the governing elites, e.g. "upset about corruption, fraud, and impunity? So are we, and we know just which immigrants and negroes to slap around to do something about it. Look over there!") This seems potentially plausible but also a little too Rube Goldbergish.
I think public corruption and the impunity of the Epstein class are things that have been decreasing for decades (or anyway until the Trump administration), but there has been increased transparency about them.
Unlike crime, it's not actually clear to me that people commonly mistakenly think disorder--especially as measured via litter, graffiti, and homelessness--is much worse than in the past.
But if I go with the premise, perhaps it's more a misfiring of a common knowledge problem? People think that other people think disorder is now okay or even honorable, and that's worth fighting against. Liberals over there are perfectly content to let miscreants ruin society all in the name of CRT! Or something like that.
I think your last argument here has some explanatory oompf: crime may be down, but there being a seemingly “Pro-Crime” “Pro-Disorder” section of the populace is new, so the anti-crime voices now have the extra burden of not just calling for a solution to a problem we all perceive as a problem, but winning a culture war over whether crime is bad. Crime is bad if crime is worse, and if crime is not worse then it gives ammunition to the “Pro-Crime” side.
I notice I am surprised this topic is so ‘sticky’. Perhaps there is a silent majority not so worried about crime, but even if the commenters across these posts are a small minority; I don’t think I have observed a cohort of the ACX commentariat so closed to updates after being presented with a lot of data. What’s striking is that many comments here are still of the second sort Scott enumerated above. It feels very “arguments as soldiers.” If your data says crime is down, it must be wrong, or it is the wrong data, because crime is UP! As flawed a method as RootClaim was, I almost want to see a Steve Sailor v. Scott Alexander debate on this, perhaps nothing less would move people. While I am not impressed with their rhetorical conduct; I do think for so many otherwise reasonable people to be so closed to persuasion is evidence of something not being captured in the data story which has been told so far. To throw my anecdata into the mix: my small northeast hometown had the crime spike, but crime has remained much higher than pre-pandemic.
>"I do think for so many otherwise reasonable people to be so closed to persuasion is evidence of something not being captured in the data story which has been told so far."
You've hit the nail on the head here.
I've lived in the same neighborhood in Seattle for a decade. Things got much worse with COVID, got a little better as things loosened up, but are now deteriorating again.
Anecdotal, yes, but definitely not just misperception due to (social) media, my moving from a low crime to high crime area, or any of the other dismissive "explanations" offered in support of the statistics' story.
(bit of a repost by me) but I'm still not convinced the phenomena of people thinking "crime is getting worse" isn't just the well known memory bias where you remember "significant" events more than mundane things.
In other words, your brain accumulates memories of crime (whether you were the victim or not) like your body does heavy metal. Modern media trends exacerbate it as now you can inject the memories of more people.
Maybe we can get data on people's _perceptions_ in other countries and time periods over time? I wouldn't be surprised if people just perceive things getting worse all the time.
The boombox thing is either about noise, or about noncriminal, generally anti-social (inconsiderate) behavior. The "people are acting more like assholes than they used to" thing might be neither crime nor disorder. Here's a big city thing that we have no data about but can collect: how many random businesses on a street will allow you to use their restroom if you walked in and made the request. Their reasons for not letting you, and the fact that they will not let you, might be a big indication of how grumpy people are in that city about crime and disorder as data about crime and disorder.
Love the piece - well thought out and takes a balanced view. What do you suppose is the reason for the human brain to do this comparison ? Are we prewired to constantly compare things ?
Is it a bit like gas prices or inflation in general, everyone notices the spike up (BLM/COVID-19 era), no one notices the gentle drift down? If so people may still be reacting to jump in 2020/2021 like they are for inflation (not a perfect analogy, inflation is more of a ratchet whereas crime can go both ways, but it does take a long time for locals to update on an area being 'safe' that used to not be considered 'safe').
Ubiquitous cameras (cell phones, ring, body cams) and algorithmic social media have made distant crime much more visceral and brought the imagery of high crime areas in the cities and certain rural areas to suburbs in a manner that the nightly news did not.
It's also missing a bit to cover shoplifting and not cover porch pirates, in certain areas at least that is probably people's most direct experience of crime.
Crime / Law & Order is a perennial political topic, but I don't think current discussion has reached the peak of the 1990's with it's 3 strike laws etc. so in some sense it is perhaps still well calibrated? I wonder how many people who were alive in the late 1980's early 1990's think crime now is worse now than then.
That said I think there are also culture wide periods of pessimism and optimism related to, but somewhat independent of, actual facts on the ground. e.g. roughly rounding dates 1920's optimistic, 1930's-WWII pessimistic, 1950's - early 1960's optimistic, 1970's pessimistic, 1980's optimistic, 1990's - 2000's pessimistic, mid to late 2010's optimistic, present pessimistic.
I think you're missing a lot of classes of 'disorder' that aren't necessarily illegal. For example, I think many people consider protest movements (now matter how legitimate) as 'disorder' in the sense that we use it here and the ubiquity of cameras has made them a lot more visible. Jan 6th, ICE protests, and especially Covid-19/BLM protests have a lot of overhang (people are slow to update). Certain types of rhetoric, e.g. Abolish the Police, could also come across as disorderly. Pot legalization and the ubiquity of stores selling the same in some states may also code as disorderly, especially to folks old enough to have lived through the war on drugs.
"especially to folks old enough to have lived through the war on drugs."
Nobody alive today remembers a time without the war on drugs!
The war on drugs started in earnest in 1914 with the Harrison Act, though the term "war on drugs" became popularized under Nixon.
Widespread legalization of marijuana notwithstanding, the war on drugs is still raging and being used to justify all kinds of authoritarianism at home and military intervention abroad.
Well you’re right in a sense, that the war on drugs is not strictly about enforcing a set of laws. But to say it hasn’t sucked in a ridiculous amount of resources and caused a ton of lasting human, institutional, and geopolitical damage just like a “real” war would be plain wrong.
>It's also missing a bit to cover shoplifting and not cover porch pirates, in certain areas at least that is probably people's most direct experience of crime
Supposedly the NCVS covers this, but I'm pretty skeptical of surveys in general.
>I think you're missing a lot of classes of 'disorder' that aren't necessarily illegal.
I don’t think protests are nearly as common in the Trump era as they were in the Bush era. And even the late 90s was actually a high-protest time - I recall the “battle of Seattle” with anti-globalization protests outside the WTO meeting of 1998 (back when opposing free trade was left-coded).
One thing I haven't seen mentioned is that there is simply a larger proportion of Americans living in urban environments. 20-30 years ago many would be living in suburban/rural environments, and would be complaining about different kinds of disorder.
Now, the complainers live in the cities and complain about the cities. Many of them did not grow up in the cities that they complain about. Their frame of reference is not the city of 20-30 years ago, it is the idyllic suburban town they grew up in.
Hasn’t the proportion of Americans living in the suburbs been constantly increasing? I suspect that the bigger factor is that the readership of this blog is concentrated in demographics who are of the age range to have recently moved to the city in defiance of the broader trend of moving to the suburbs.
This is some of those topics that comes up a lot online but doesn’t match what I or my friends see IRL. We don’t feel uncomfortable or unsafe in downtowns. You see the occasional homeless person or graffiti but for the most part things are clean and orderly. As I said in response to your previous post, is this just a SF thing?
Here's my own personal anecdote on disorder. In the town where I live, there are now homeless people panhandling at intersections. There were not any such homeless people here even a couple years ago. Are there more homeless people now than then? Probably not, my guess is that homeless people from the nearby big city just recently decided to start going out to the suburbs to beg. So, in the past couple years, my local community's perception of disorder (begging homeless people) has gone up, even if actual rates of homelessness haven't. My guess is this is similar for people complaining about or noticing disorder in general: total disorder isn't up, but it has started moving into the suburbs where it wasn't before, so people living there perceive an increase in disorder from the local increase, even if there is no corresponding national increase in the statistics.
People spend so much time, effort and money to avoid crime that it is hardly surprising that crime is down, nonetheless this is all extremely burdensome
Are people spending as much effort on this as they were a decade or two ago? Certainly not as much as they were in the 1990s or 1980s, when it was common for white collar women to take self-defense classes.
I would have thought “not going out because of perceived disorder” was much higher in the 80s and 90s. Nowadays people just don’t go out because they’d rather be on Netflix or TikTok. Self defense classes are much, much more intrusive on your life, taking up hours that you could be doing something fun, rather than locks and cameras, which you can just set and forget.
I think you misunderstand why women did self-defence classes, when you argue they could instead do something fun. It certainly wasn't due to any realistic* appreciation of what would lower their likelihood to be victimised.
Also, maybe people go out less only because of infinite streaming slop. Or maybe they also go out because out is just a less friendly and reasonable place.
* Realistic matters because the context was whether people truly spend and adjust their lives to lower their likelihood of crime (which of course they do) and if they do it more nowadays, which they also certainly do, but you might argue about intention. The easiest way to avoid being a victim of crime is to live alone, with a secure door, good cameras and never go out.
And, I can attest that there were VASTLY more homeless people camping on the Venice Beach boardwalk in 2020 than there were in the early 90s (of course, you could rent a studio apt on a walk street 1/2 block from the beach for $500/mo in 1990).
I think that the original post gets it exactly (mostly?) backwards. I think that it is that a large cohort now grows up sheltered and away from cities (and/or is now sheltered and has access to social media). These people are shocked by what they see in cities because they have never spent time in cities (or never had access to a way to complain about it broadly). I think that if you live in a city (at least if you spend time outside in a city), it is pretty clear that it is safer and less disorderly than it has generally been in the past.
I live in the heart of Denver, my kids walk to the park and school, we walk as a family to restaurants, it's fantastic. People in the suburbs act like we live in a war zone.
This links to something I noticed with the ‘antitheft’ locking things up in supermarkets in England.
My entire adult life, seeing that meat or cheese (or other improbable things, to a sheltered teenager) had security locks on them was a standard sign that you were in a poor neighbourhood or cheaper supermarket. 10-20 years ago or more, a pretty standard post online would be a teenager seeing such a thing for the first time, posting about it, and then everyone replying with essentially the four yorkshiremen sketch about the ridiculous things they’d seen locked up or shoplifted. Last time I looked, I could find several older posts on Reddit of essentially this character on British-dominated subs, although much of the content was starting to be deleted. It wasn’t unusual to have in-person conversations that mirrored this, either.
A couple of years ago, I started to see posts (or throw-away comments within posts) that were different. Instead of ‘here is a thing I see in my local supermarket’ followed by replies amused by their naivety, I started to see ‘people have shared images with me of cheese locked up in supermarkets, which I never used to see, therefore extreme poverty is forcing people to steal cheese and this is the Tories fault’ or ‘people are posting images of cheese locked up in supermarkets, which was never a problem around here, so it must be gangs of Romanians robbing our supermarkets’.
People who sometimes made it clear that they barely left their own home were responding to contextless images posted online, in spaces without the ‘local’ feel of those older internet spaces, and so not getting the gentle ribbing and pushback that previously was standard.
Theory/hypothesis #5: there's been an increase in media coverage (news and social) of crime/disorder that's decoupled from the frequency of crime/disorder incidents , leading people to the (false) perception that they are increasing.
This is absolutely the truth. Worse yet, people actively seek it out for dopamine hits. That's not even to mention that we are bombarded with police procedurals in which police actually prevent and solve crime, a constant stream of shows and movies about massive criminal enterprises, etc... The reality of most crime in the US is class warfare, wage theft, unsafe working environment, industry polluting low socioeconomic neighborhoods, etc...
Perhaps crime really is down in absolute terms, but now it is more diffuse. For example, maybe 20 years ago there were 100 murders/year, but they all happened in Murdertown, where normal people don't go. So for the normies the murder rate was 0. Now, murders are down to 75/year, but 50 of them happen in Murdertown and 25 are spread out everywhere else. This is a massive increase from the point of view of everyone but Murdertowners !
It'd be interesting if it's double whammy of (more) suburbanites going to town and seeing (relative) hell, and suburban itself getting worse. Seems like something that we can actually analyze if we slice the data hard enough.
I would also like to point out that events like shoplifting, harassment, and even obstructing traffic, used to be classified as "crimes", not "disorder"; so there's definitely some reporting bias going on.
> This feels wrong to me: people aren’t comparing the present to the golden age of 2019, they’re comparing it to the golden age of their parents and grandparents’ generation
Are they? Possibly I'm over-generalizing from my own experience, but I am _absolutely_ comparing the present to the golden age of ~2010. Things have gotten significantly worse in my neighborhood in the last 15 years (including crime, actually – index felonies in 2025 were ~30% higher than in 2010, against a ~5% increase in population), with the trend accelerating a lot in the last 5.
I agree that the very long-term trends are pretty uniformly positive (crime is way down compared to 1985!), but pointing out that things have improved over the last 40 years isn't really helpful when people are upset about how things have changed in the last 5.
The early 2010s is definitely the one time that I think there is a good case for these issues being less bad! Scott seems to have missed the huge issues of slums and shantytowns in the 1930s and 1950s.
Many of these social ills are photographed and shared online now, so they seem omnipresent.
Additionally, the media environment by which people make conclusions about their larger world has changed radically, rewarding sensational images, opinions of outrages, and a general climate of impending disaster.
Another factor is what you might call "outreach". Our local police have a helpful regular email which lists all the local crimes. They no doubt feel they're providing a public service but it just makes you feel that you live in a high crime area (which I don't). Obviously it does no harm to their job security! But less crime with more awareness is the problem Scott is highlighting.
I’ve been living in Chicago for most of my life, and here are some observations: Yes, urban life seems more disordered now. But this is mainly because of a few microclimates of disorder that are also high-traffic areas. Take the Red Line on the CTA, for example. This is one of the main subway/elevated lines (along with the Blue Line), and it runs north/south from the edge of the North Side to deep into the South Side. I take it 4-5 times a week from the north end of the city to downtown, and it’s become quite an adventure with all the homeless, miscreants, and marauders. I don’t ever remember it being this bad. On each train car you can usually find at least one sprawled-out homeless person, and the number of homeless persons increases the further you go back down the line. Most cars smell like cigarette smoke and piss. I have about a dozen crazy Red Line stories from the past two years. I have almost none from the prior 15 years.
My theory was (and still to an extent is) that the forces of disorder (homeless, miscreants, and marauders) have always existed on the Red Line, though perhaps in smaller numbers. I don’t know. But the main idea is that there are still fewer commuters, so the disorder is a lot more visible. It’s possible, too, that the forces of disorder took advantage of the empty-ish trains during the pandemic, taking them over, leaving their encampments under the bridge, and they now they still consider the trains “their own.” These people always existed; it’s just that now they’re a) more visible and b) in high-traffic areas.
Then there are all the tents set up in the public parks along Lake Shore Drive. Sometimes I take the 147 bus from the North Side to downtown (better than the train!!, but slower), and I see dozens upon dozens of homeless tents. I mean, a lot. Even in the winter. I don’t remember seeing this ever before. Perhaps the city officials are more tolerant about these tents. But similar to the point I made above, this symbol of disorder (homeless encampments) is located in a highly trafficked area. These homeless people probably existed before, but they were probably living under an overpass. I don’t know.
So…this is one localized explanation on why our perceptions don’t match up to the data. Maybe there are other Chicagoans here who can back me up or challenge me.
In New York skells traditionally favor the E and R lines for use as their bedrooms and, to a disturbing extent, restrooms. This is because these two lines are entirely underground, with no elevated stations and hence no unwelcome gusts of cold air. While this is relevant mainly during cold weather the preference exists year round.
Ah, interesting. The Red Line (and the Blue Line) are the lines with the most underground stops, so that makes sense. Also, I had to look up "skells." I lived in Brooklyn for a year (in 2005-06), and I never came across that term!
The spatial distribution of crime and disorder have changed in ways that make many more people upset. Crime used to be, bluntly, a ghetto problem. Now it's spread equitably across even the nice parts of town so everyone notices it. Money isn't the shield it used to be.
What a great pair of articles on crime and disorder. I knew much of this but it's really great seeing it all in one place. You have absolutely a number devastated right-wing talking points.
The reason people think crime and disorder are out of control is because any amount of crime and disorder is disheartening, and because many people were sheltered from crime and disorder in their childhood, and they miss it on some level. This series of posts is a valuable corrective.
Some of the earliest writings from ancient Sumeria talk about how the end of the world must be nigh, because of the degeneration of society. Time for everybody to just calm down and have some perspective. Though that doesn't mean we need to stop worrying about crime and disorder altogether.
A couple of years ago I noticed a tent city for the first time. The tent city is now gone, but going from zero to one was much more noticeable than going from one to zero. I can't judge broader trends using a single anecdotal data point, but subconsciously my mind tries its hardest.
What if expectations change over time? In 2026, people feel poor if they don’t have a supercomputer in their pocket. In Texas, we expect homes to have AC. Now that electric cars are becoming more prevalent, I get more annoyed at large diesel engines driving by.
One might expect that the best future should have close to zero crime, right? We have cameras everywhere, police drones, and a Black Mirror-esque reputation system that discourages bad behavior without having to imprison people. Likewise, all our money is digital, mostly harder to steal, and our homes have fewer valuables.
If we can root for AIs that cure cancer, why can’t we have higher expectations for what urban living should be like?
Another take: much of the disorder today exists only for political reasons. We decided that using force to prevent shoplifting is politically incorrect, so stores have to perform all sorts of acrobatics with locked shelves instead. If we made it legal for bouncers to kick shoplifters out, we would have less of that.
Now it’s in the past, but the pro-Palestine student encampments at universities were infuriating because colleges didn’t use the force at their disposal to resolve them.
"What do you mean there's a human shit in front of the garage?" I ask my wife. We had just moved to San Francisco from NC and were not accustomed to that sort of thing. It was 2011, so far from the hellscape you hear about today, but still had negatives. I would routinely walk over Nob Hill through the Tenderloin to my SOMA office. The most notable things to me were the plethora of car models I'd never seen: Rolls Royce, Lamborghinis, Bentleys, and G-Wagons at the Pacific Union Club. My wife actually audited it while we were there. Even though the accountants had high-pedigree college educations, you were still help and had to go in the back door of the club.
Down the hill was the worst destitution I've ever seen. Still ever seen. People openly injecting heroin on the street—which the first time I mistook for someone clipping his nails—and people with puke all over themselves head to toe. The way the crowds stepped around this was fascinating. It was like a homeless man caked in vomit was a ghost only I could see. One time when I called 911 because I thought a man was dead, I got looks like I was doing something wrong from someone with a septum piercing and a chrome bag. Mr Homeless was in fact dead and the firemen thanked me for calling it in.
When my mother in law came to visit with her friends a homeless man openly masturbated in their direction on the MUNI. I half expected them to just take my wife back at this point, but it was seen as kind of funny and not a danger to safety. Still these things started grating on my wife. We had an opportunity through our business to relocate to Santa Monica. I loved the SF tech scene and some of the amenities, but her sanity was also important. Santa Monica circa 2012 had homeless. They were constrained to the tourist areas like the Pier, definitely not in the residential neighborhoods.
There was nary a homeless encampment either. Just the stories you hear about Skid Row in downtown LA. We watched the changes over the decade. Select West LA drugs stores started having the random shit just as you walk in the store. People would let their dogs just poop while browsing the Apple store and not even clean it up. Your bike had a one-hour half-life if it was not chained up. 3 hours for the accessories on the bike like water bottles, seats and lights. I had things stolen off my bike constantly, even in short trips to get coffee.
We put up a sign, "DO NOT LEAVE PACKAGES HERE, PUT THEM OVER THE FENCE" to dissuade the FedEx guy from just leaving the package, which had a ten-minute half-life—barely enough time to race home and get whatever Amazon Prime merchandise we had ordered. One time, while viewing the Ring camera, we saw FedEx stop and read the sign. Then place the package down on top of it. My wife raced home to try to save the new MacBook she had ordered. Alas, it was saved.
Reporting a bike incident the police would just laugh at you. Sometimes, at least in Santa Monica they would humor you with a report. One of my coworkers who lived downtown was punched in the face by a vagrant. This was just prior to covid and the concern on slack was he used "homeless" and not that he was punched in the face. He didn't report that incident either.
By 2020 our local post office was outright overrun. You could not use the post office due to the number of tents in the parking lot. Statistically maybe you were safe, but no one dropped off packages anymore. Guaranteed harassment if you did. Old ladies had to walk into busy streets to avoid walking through tent clutter on the sidewalk. Even in nice residential neighborhoods littered with 1.2 - $2 milion dollar homes (I know all the security is in the neighborhoods with $5 million+ homes). Everything in local stores ended up behind glass. You had to ask someone to get laundry detergent. It felt like a dystopian ghetto you'd find in 80s/90s scifi.
We moved in 2022. Since being back in a mid sized town, I can leave my bike unattended while getting coffee. Packages and other items we leave on the porch are never stolen. My car window has not been smashed even if I leave a MacBook and iPad on the seat in plain view.
It's amazing how much stuff is locked behind cases now. Anything over $20 that is easily concealable, such as small clothing items and non-bulky toiletries. This is obviously a big enough of a problem that Walmart considers the enormous inconvenience to customers and their staff worth the tradeoff.
Boomboxes? I thought those disappeared in the 90s. I have not seen one in public since then. Could this be a local phenomenon in the Bay Area that is bound to spread nationwide?
They are bluetooth-enabled speakers, with a rechargeable lithium ion battery, and a convenient carrying handle so people can broadcast their poor life choices in music format.
No smartphone is a boombox. It's not about electronic sophistication, it's about the boom. Which means acreage of speaker, and drive power, and those don't fit in a smartphone form factor.
Boomboxes are much more annoying than smartphones, when used irresponsibly.
The day before this was posted, the mayor of Oakland’s car was stolen from city hall.
It is hard to overestimate the kind of disorder found in the Bay Area, especially SF, where I have been threatened and assaulted on multiple occasions by people experiencing being unhoused and insane.
I don’t know what kind of statistics capture this disorder, but that is a question about statistics, rather than about what is actually happening in the city.
I think this is missing something fundamental. Why would one say, "disorder in cities is a problem?" Maybe because one has charts showing it's an increasing problem, sure.
But what if you had a major political movement to declare, as smugly as possible, that disorder in cities is not a problem and the people who say it is are weak racist wyppl? You know this is happening, you hint at it when you talk about how you're framing this piece.
That is: it's not that urban disorder is worse than in the past; it's that in the past, there was broad implicit agreement that urban disorder was bad acts by bad people, and now we have to defend that premise out loud.
I think you're brushing off the population aspect too easily. I, like many other people, do not care about how many people are getting murdered and robbed in some godforsaken ghetto, because the time they spend doing that to each other is time that is not spent doing so to the more affluent. If various attempts at integration are responsible for the perceived increase in crime by more productive members of society, then the solution is not more policing, but more aggressive gentrification and containment measures.
I think that was implicit in the premises of the person I was replying to. If you don’t accept that, then you should actually think about the problems rather than just saying “its the poor people’s fault”.
My opinion is that a large chunk of the country has a psychological need to see the country as declining, and a subset of the news media that is happy to give them what they want.
I think it's difficult to deny that the USA has grown more secular over the past several decades. Christianity doesn't have the same cultural power it once did, and more and more of the society openly rejects it. For a certain kind of literally minded person, this *must* result in society going downhill, because- well, what if it didn't? What if had gay marriage and fewer people going to church and more people scoffing at the Bible and society got healthier and happier? What if things got better as people got less godly? For some people, facing this idea would, I think, be devastating. When I read their posts, I almost sense a glee in the idea that society would fall, because it would validate their worldview.
My other theory is that Boomers got the high crime rates of the 70s stuck in their heads and haven't updated since.
As much as I hate to say it, the 1990s were 26 years ago. Saying "Sure, [thing] is up, but it's still lower than it was in the '90s!" isn't going to be convincing to many people - especially the non-negligible portion of the adult population who do not remember the 1990s.
I live in Tucson, Arizona. A quick web search shows Tucson is high above the natural average in crime trends, easy enough to verify. We have been in the news because of a high-profile abduction of a person. It takes a minor celebrities relative being kidnapped to break into the national discourse.
I have lived here most of my adult life, since 2007, and in my opinion crime and disorder are both far worse than when I moved here. I once had a guy try to break into my apartment while I was home. This was in the Dodge-Flower neighborhood, one of the more notorious neighborhoods for crime. Uncomfortable encounters with unstable people on the street are very common. I take the bus, most people here drive. Obviously if you have a car its easy to avoid most of the unpleasantness on the streets. There are plenty of places I, as a white guy, would not go.
Littler is a major problem. Tucson has a number of washes, where rainwater is redirected. These are often filled with trash and dumped furniture, especially at crossings with arterial roadways. Litter is highly prevalent, and the city seems to do little about it. I've seen volunteer groups cleaning intersections, but the intersections outnumber the volunteers. I see litter everywhere, with the city doing little beyond passive measures like emptying public wastebins which are easy to locate downtown but typically only present at bus stops. I've observed people digging through those for cans and sometimes lighting the bag on fire, which can go unaddressed for days or even weeks.
We also have loads of homeless, the 'boom box' guys, and some graffiti, though I dont think the graffiti is too bad.
I think it's more complicated even than that, but graffiti is a good example.
Why is graffiti bad?
Municipalities will spend untold amounts of money and planning capacity on "public art" which usually nobody likes, and spend untold amounts more on removing the much more popular public art that Nature provides for free. Far fewer budding graphic artists are inspired by Jeff Koons than by the top end of our urban folk tradition. Isn't it, in the liberal sense, a classic victimless crime? Somebody built an ugly concrete wall, and somebody else – many somebodies else, a whole ecosystem of somebodies else – made it less ugly. What is there to complain about?
What is it about graffiti that actually makes people mad?
Opponents of graffiti typically don't discriminate between skilled and unskilled graffiti. Smash 137 is as bad as Cool "Disco" Dan. The problem isn't technical skill, but lack of authorization. They didn't go through the proper process. They didn't get the right permits. They _broke_ the _law_. And even in cases where they didn't, where the city has set aside a place where graffiti is tolerated... it's still a fundamentally antisocial form, isn't it?
But what does "antisocial" mean here?
Graffiti is a phenomenon of contested spaces, a record of vitality and lack of obedience. (Lack of obedience, not "disobedience" – paganism, not Satanism.) This is already offensive to a certain (class-linked) way of seeing the world, which we can call _salaryman consciousness_. What is it like to be a salaryman? What kind of consciousness does it require to be a trusted functionary of a hierarchical system? It certainly requires obedience, but that's the bare minimum. A former Apple employee described it to me like this: because Tim Apple leads the whole company, but can't _see_ the whole company, it's the duty of Tim Apple's soldiers to _install a Tim Apple tulpa_, to simulate Tim Apple in their head to the greatest useful fidelity, and to follow its commands. One ceases, in a sense, to be an independent organism, with independent strength, and an independent sense of vitality, and assumes one's role as a member and representative of apple, and a follower of Tim Apple, within a hierarchy that's much more powerful than any individual, but much less agile and much less free.
The question of the consequences of salaryman consciousness is too large for this comment box to contain. One reasonable follow-up might be: to what extent can we have a republic of free men when the professional-managerial class is socialized into something not entirely distinct from a refined and controlled Führerprinzip? Another might be: to what extent does this resemble Eye-of-Providence monotheism as a technology of scale and control? But the most relevant question here is: how does this impact the salaryman's judgment of contested and uncontested spaces, and of signs of vitality?
Suppose you live in a place with bare surfaces, but no graffiti. What does this mean about the people who live there? What does it say about the culture of a place that it hasn't developed a subculture of people who value art and vitality over obedience? It's a signal with positive and negative aspects: obedience culture (of which salaryman culture is a part) is incompatible with mugging, so your wallet, and your self-image as an apex predator who can go anywhere alone at night unperturbed, will be undisrupted, but it's also incompatible with culture and art, and (perhaps increasingly) with having a fulfilling social life. Didn't Malcolm X once say something about white people needing to be _taught_ how to dance? It's like that. The mental structures you need to simulate Tim Apple in your head, or to work in the kind of compliance department Patrick McKenzie writes about, aren't as easy to take off as a necktie: they're a culture, into which the children of the managerial class (or the "bourgeoisie", if you want to pretend you're in 1920s Vienna) are acculturated, and they come with certain tradeoffs. There are other cultures that come with other tradeoffs, and in some cases the upside is that you get to have a lot more fun, and a lot more vitality, than the man in the gray suit who spends his whole life in _owned space_.
> but it's also incompatible with culture and art, and (perhaps increasingly) with having a fulfilling social life
Japanese people are plenty capable of all of that, and they're probably one of the most hierarchial societies around. You do not need to be the same person everywhere. You can be open with your friends and family while still acting your part at your workplace.
Speaking for myself, I don't like graffiti, but I do like public art like murals etc. I just think most graffiti is ugly, and part of the public art process that you describe (imperfect though it may be) is to try to nudge things into producing art that is less ugly.
As a store manager of the most successful big box chain department store in America currently that’s based out of Little Rock, Arkansas - I can tell you that out of the 120-150 times I stopped a person thieving (meaning, me personally and not one of my co managers!) over the last 5 years i have reported it three times due to the egregious nature of the theft.
Otherwise this isn’t worth the 2 hour ordeal of having to personally catch the person leaving my building with merchandise, making sure they don’t run away without touching them, wrangling them into an area, politely holding them there, making sure my camera guy got the theft on video, waiting for the police, filing all the reports, etc … I have too much shit to do.
I’m one store out of almost 300 and the people I have talked to feel the same exact way.
I understand this is an anecdote - but it’s also not. I could of course be lying. Or my memory could be inflating things. And maybe it was worse in 1997 - I wouldn’t know. But it sucks now - and it sucks knowing nothing, literally zero, is being done about these people.
Heh, I get a laugh out of the way you give your employer’s name without actually giving your employer’s name. Just like how I always say that I work for the Extremely Large Online Retailer.
In any event, another big downside to catching and detaining a shoplifter is that it can very easily turn deadly. That is NOT worth the risk.
18 months ago a guy saw he was being watched, put all the merch down, went around where no one was, and put his gun under a pile of denim.
Only reason I didn’t talk to him like 3 minutes before is because an employee needed my help urgently with something - fuck that.
The company is insured for theft and hires a 15$ an hour retired person to stand around and pretend to be security. They don’t care - no way I will.
But it all leads to more and more ‘ disorder ‘ as Scott calls it here. But it’s not … it’s tens of thousands of unreported crimes from just one retailer.
There is no reason to think that disorder is increasing--that's a red herring. But people become more defensive/rally around their community/become more aggressive toward outgroups under certain conditions:
Although the economy is strictly numerical terms has gotten slightly better/held steady in recent years, public attitudes are still mostly negative: Most Americans continue to rate the U.S. economy negatively as partisan gap widens (Pew study 10/2025):
It's hard to measure changes in this, obviously you can't just ask "Do you feel more threatened by black people now?" but it seems plausible, what with the rise of widespread pushback against the anti-racism agenda. Note that whether or not minorities are or should be threatening the status of mainstream communities isn't the point, but whether or not mainstream Americans are feeling their status as being threatened (rightly or wrongly), and how that affects their perceptions of social disorder.
As for whether this is increasing recently, this is interesting because one could see the backlash against immigration as fitting this framework. The population is aging, which puts a different perspective on it. Wealth disparity is increasing, which also aligns with point 1 above. Once again, I want to point out that whether or not people are right to feel this way isn't the issue--whether they feel that way (for whatever reason) and how that affects their perceptions of disorder is.
4) Spread of Politically Polarizing Media:
Do I need to elaborate on this? Anyone want to challenge the claim that mass media is more polarizing today than previously?
It ain't about actual rates of social disorder, it's about what might cause people to perceive increasing social disorder, and how that might play out in attitudes toward crime.
I'd intuit it less as "crime as a proxy for disorder", and more as "crime as a proxy for social trust", with a dash of "crime as a proxy for population density".
"Social trust" is a very wishy-washy, you-know-it-when-you-see it term that covers a lot of hard to define components of community life. It covers all the little niceties like "do you say good morning to people you walk past in the neighborhood?", the bigger trust issues like "are you comfortable leaving your door unlocked while you nip to the shop?", and the minor etiquettes of "do people return their supermarket trollies before driving away?". It's a lot of individually-minor things that add up to inform the impression you have of how friendly your environment is.
I think it's intuitively obvious to most observers that general social trust has declined over the past fifty years or so. Some of that is cultural - people tend to behave how they feel they're expected to behave, and today we're constantly bombarded with outrage-bait about how awful everyone and everywhere is.
Some of it, I think, is an artifact of population densities. People don't interact with a perfectly representative sample of their local neighbours. In a small town of 1,000 people, you might get one properly unsavoury person, but then everyone knows them as "that one person". In a town of 100,000 people, you might get the same proportion of unsavouries (100), but you're much less likely to interact with just the one. Instead, you'll hear of groups, or see multiple different bad actors, and then you fit that to your intuitive impression of how sketchy the town is.
As populations get denser and more urbanised, we're all more exposed to more of the outlier elements, even if the absolute proportion of those elements stays the same (or even goes down).
I theorize that whatever side someone comes down on with regards to this topic can be fairly well predicted by their general political alignment, regardless of either their personal experience or grasp of the relevant data, and that whatever argument(s) is/are used to justify their stance will be backfilled in later.
Disorder noise isn't just people carrying boomboxes, this should include people playing loud music while in or on vehicles, and also what are probably deliberately loud vehicles.
What about vehicles that are not deliberately loud, but have big loud engines or air brakes? What about talking in loud voices? How about crying babies? Barking dogs? Squeaky hinges on doors? Wheeled luggage that goes ka-thunk ka-thunk ka-thunk down the sidewalk? Wearing loud colors? Signs in all caps?
Not sure what your point is. Oversized subwoofers are a major problem. Low frequencies travel very well over long distances. I have felt my windows shake in their frames from subwoofers 50 feet away. It's absolutely a major problem and should be a fineable offense, perhaps with impounding the car after repeated violations. But as far as I know, it's perfectly legal. And good luck getting the police to respond to a moving noise complaint.
Really, a major problem? Maybe you're a high-end recording artist, and these subwoofer sounds are interrupting your sessions and ruining takes while Rick Rubin looks at the clock and drums his fingers on the desk? He costs a lot per hour.
Windows actually shaking in their frames? Are these double-hung windows with old wooden frames? Maybe you've got bad tensioners?
My point is, if nothing else, that sensitivity to these kinds of things is subjective.
If loud subwoofers occasionally driving by are what falls into the category of a "major problem" for you, and not a non-issue, then your quality of living must be extremely high.
I think you are trying to be annoying. You have succeeded. Congratulations.
I was listing what annoys me, not trying to eliminate anything which might annoy anyone.
My point is that I'm rather sensitive to noise. Noise makes my life worse. I'll cut slack for noise which seems to have a purpose like home and street repairs. I have no fondness for noise that just seems to be for people who like making noise.
Sorry, you're partly right: I was being annoying, and it was on purpose. But it wasn't pointless; I was making the same point I made to Doug A above, that the extent to which these things are actual problems is subjective. There's always going to be things that annoy people, some of which are things that have a purpose, others that don't. Elsewhere it was stated, and I agree, that there is probably some optimal level of tolerance for these annoyances. Too much tolerance and you get lawlessness, too little and you get stifling totalitarianism. But I think the optimum you expressed is probably too far on the stifling side.
Thank you very much. It's so rare to see someone modify an opinion.
As for "subjective", that doesn't necessarily mean arbitrary or disposable. Noise and air pollution affective health, even if some people aren't very sensitive to them.
I realize that some people really like being noisy. On the whole, they can make my life worse.
On the other hand, I've been seeing more complaints about fireworks in the past few years, but I love fireworks, especially the big sky bursts. Drone displays aren't a substitute.
It's not much recompense, but I pass the word about earmuffs for dogs, cats, and horses.
I enjoy how Scott includes boomboxes in every section even without statistics or external info relevant to them, purely because his auditory sensitivity (which is real and which I respect) makes it his personal carthago delenda est.
I think you are missing the actual reason here. In the past there was a LOT of crime, but for the majority of people, your actual experience of crime was to see it on your television on the nightly news or in the newspaper the next morning, packaged and explained to you in a way that didn't feel like it was happening on your doorstep. Maybe once or twice in your life would you have the experience of witnessing a violent crime, such that, while terrifying, it was a very rare thing for you to actually see in its unedited, graphic reality.
NOW (and with increasing velocity due to the huge rise of vertical video starting in the pandemic era), it is possible to see in our "feeds" every day countless eyewitness viral videos of disorder - shoplifting, destruction of property, assault, and even graphic murder. Right there on that phone in your hand, inside your house.
Depending on how your algo has been tuned (or how you have unwittingly tuned your algo!) you may see this disorder, relative to non-disorder activity showing up in your feeds, at 10X or 100X the actual rate of disorder in the wider world. In fact, the it may be that those videos are unwittingly (or indeed wittingly!) temporally or geographically mislabeled to ratchet up any feelings of fear they might inspire.
And further it may be that by setting up their content delivery algos to reward certain behaviors by the content consumers that then boosts certain types of content, the platform owners may have unwittingly (or indeed wittingly!) ensconced us in a "media" climate in which it certainly seems to everyone, passively consuming whatever content shows up on their devices, that disorder is really getting out of hand!!
And that is why it "feels" like the world is getting more dangerous. We have screens in our pockets telling us every day that the world is getting more dangerous.
Could the public disorder issue, paradoxically, be caused by more rigid policing of assault and battery? Hear me out.
I hear lots of anecdotes about strangers saying aggressive things with a threatening demeanor, but not in a way that is explicitly illegal. For example, one commenter said he was recently told by a stranger, "I hope the Devil rapes you." That's an example of disturbing disorder, but it's not prosecutable.
I don't think it was prosecutable even in the 1960s, but I wonder if society was more willing to look the other way while the recipient of that comment responded with an illegal punch. Which would have served as a major deterrent, even for most mentally ill people. After all, even severely mentally ill people typically have some sense of self-preservation.
These days, even retaliatory THREATS are routinely prosecuted as assault. I don't know what the solution is; we can't necessarily have people go around threatening and punching each other to defend their honor, because hypersensitive people see threats and insults that were never intended.
Maybe we need to bite the bullet and restrict disturbing speech like "I hope you die" or "I hope you get raped?" Or maybe we need to regulate yelling more. I know that's opening a can of worms, and most of us don't want to go there. But if the alternative is having streets so disorderly that people vote for brutal authoritarianism out of desperation, maybe it's better to bite the bullet preemptively.
"I don't know what the solution is; we can't necessarily have people go around threatening and punching each other to defend their honor, because hypersensitive people see threats and insults that were never intended."
That sounds a lot like a self-correcting problem, and the norm in places and eras without a functional government. In the absence of centralized law enforcement, honor culture develops and threats and insults invite retribution from the injured party.
It's not necessarily a self correcting problem, because societies based on honor culture are sometimes full of senseless death and violence. In those particular societies, it's not like you always conduct an effective investigation to determine if your loved one was justified when they said they were dishonored. You assume people in your team generally tell the truth, and that outsiders don't.
Sure, that kind of society is superficially polite, and that's great until you are walking down a quiet alley and you get shot in the back for having the wrong family member or the wrong God.
Could the public disorder issue, paradoxically, be caused by more rigid policing of assault and battery? Hear me out.
I hear lots of anecdotes about strangers saying aggressive things with a threatening demeanor, but not in a way that is explicitly illegal. For example, one commenter said he was recently told by a stranger, "I hope the Devil rapes you." That's an example of disturbing disorder, but it's not prosecutable.
I don't think it was prosecutable even in the 1960s, but I wonder if society was more willing to look the other way while the recipient of that comment responded with an illegal punch. Which would have served as a major deterrent, even for most mentally ill people. After all, even severely mentally ill people typically have some sense of self-preservation.
These days, even retaliatory THREATS are routinely prosecuted as assault. I don't know what the solution is; we can't necessarily have people go around threatening and punching each other to defend their honor, because hypersensitive people see threats and insults that were never intended.
Maybe we need to bite the bullet and restrict disturbing speech like "I hope you die" or "I hope you get raped?" Or maybe we need to regulate yelling more. I know that's opening a can of worms, and most of us don't want to go there. But if the alternative is having streets so disorderly that people vote for brutal authoritarianism out of desperation, maybe it's better to bite the bullet preemptively.
"The 1930s - 1960s were a local minimum in crime and disorder of all types."
How real is this massive U shape in the graph? Should we trust data from this time to be accurate? Is there any plausible cause for such a drop?
The only thing that really seems to match up would be the end of Prohibition in 1933, which could make sense because gangs tend to produce a lot of violence, much like modern drug gangs have since the 1970s. But Prohibition only started in 1920. Does that little blip right before Prohibition mean that this pattern should have started 15 years earlier? But if so, that only pushes the question back: What would have changed right after WW1, when murders were supposedly increasing up to that point? And again, do we trust the data from that time?
> Nor does it explain why we should update so strongly on this unique period that we still feel cheated sixty years later when things aren’t quite as good.
You identify some common human thought patterns here, but also, I don't think most people today remember the pre-crime-wave era. Are they anchoring on popular perception of this era?
I wonder if people anchor on *trends* or *expectations* more than anything else. In https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/which-party-has-gotten-more-extreme?utm_source=publication-search you refer to my comment that some of the opinion polls showed a trend reversal among Republicans in the 90s, which feel like them becoming more extreme if you expected them to keep going the same direction. If we went from "horrifying dystopia" to "fine" from the 90s to the 00s, and people expected that meant that by now we would be at "Japanese-style utopia", that might explain some of the "vibe crime wave."
I also don't want to dismiss people's personal experiences, but we should consider the hypothesis that the vibes are bad largely due to propaganda campaigns designed to convince people the vibes are bad. It's all well and good to wonder if we're missing some problem that isn't showing up in the measurements, but nobody ever said bad vibes about public disorder or crime can only respond to real changes in public disorder.
I like Scott's post here but he's continued with his intensely rigid commitment to mistake theory. Bad faith actors are doing bad things for selfish reasons and tricking the public. Scott's faith in humanity is so boundless that sometimes he ties himself in knots explaining away bad faith behavior.
I want to revise my position, actually. I don't think propaganda or other deliberate bad-faith actions are the only alternate explanation. The coordination failure of "videos that make people angry get lots of views, so it's profitable to post and recommend them" can contribute to disproportionate perceptions of crime or disorder, without anyone involved setting out to convince the public of anything.
I still think they're doing bad things for selfish reasons and deliberately tricking the public. The selfish reason is to create markets for themselves and make money. Don't we have 30 years of leaked emails and audio from Fox News showing they don't really believe what they say?
Some people are doing bad things for selfish reasons, yes. I think if you write comments referencing vague "bad faith actors" like your original, you should be more specific about who you're accusing, like "Fox News executives", because it's easy for your comment to be read as an accusation of dishonesty against anyone who claims disorder is getting worse.
I'm willing to concede that you have done your homework and convinced me that maybe crime isn't overwhelmingly worse than it used to be, for some value of "it used to be".
What raises my blood pressure is how *brazen* it seems to have become since I was middle-aged. Gangs raid stores for a smash-and-grab. Every traffic light with a median has somebody standing there risking an accident and begging for a handout, sometimes (though I admit not usually) aggressively. Tent cities in downtowns that didn't used to have them. "Mostly peaceful" protests with businesses set on fire. Chains leaving San Francisco because shoplifting is destroying their profit margin and there is literally nothing they can do about it -- not even hiding half their wares in locked cabinets.
Comments here seem like they treat graffiti as childish vandalism, but I always read the graffiti I see as gangs marking their turf, which is not calming.
Crime has always been an antisocial activity, but these days it seems more like an in-your-face revolutionary activity. (Books literally espousing the theory that shoplifting is restorative justice aren't helping.) I'll admit that some of my examples are things I have not seen in person, so maybe the internet is causing me to see it as more common than it is, and maybe in the old days The News wasn't so dependent on raising my cortisol levels.
But in my mind, crime these days doesn't seem like grit in the wheels of progress but as a sign that society is breaking down. Maybe I'm just old.
"I'll admit that some of my examples are things I have not seen in person, so maybe the internet is causing me to see it as more common than it is." This. This is it.
An hour's worth of 4k HD ragebait videos of brazen crime with ten thousand angry comments would be a photo or two and a newspaper article a few decades ago.
My maternal grandfather (an ivy league-trained psychologist, 1923-2021) used to talk about how during summers in high school he would stow away on freight trains as a way to travel. He made it sound like lots of teenagers did that back then, perhaps others can verify. If that's what Harvard-bound high school students were doing for fun in the 1940s, imagine what the thuggish high school dropouts were doing.
The hobo life is romanticised now, but I'm sure hobos were not all good-natured.
Although one thing in favour of the 1930s is that the worst drug the average hobo would have had access to was alcohol. And that's bad, but it's a lot better than crystal meth.
I’m not sure where you are getting your information; there were many potent psychoactive drugs back then (1930s) that you could readily obtain—including methamphetamine (then marketed as Benzedrine)! The 1930s is also the decade that lays claim to the film Reefer Madness, whose production was a response to a perceived spike in the use of cannabis, and the antisocial affects people believed it to cause.
I think you might be stretching the point by saying they were readily obtainable. Benzedrine sure, speed, as diet pills, was going strong well into the 60s. cocaine was around. But I think Melvin is correct in that rhe drug hobos usually got to was alcohol. Whether that is better than pot is a matter of disagreement.
Refer madness was produced in 1936 by a church group that was concerned about their teenagers (the rise of black jazz musicians was a big part of it, as pot was very associated with that culture) and by 1938 it had become basically soft core pornography “disguised as moral instruction.” An independent producer saw it, realized the promise of it and bought the rights. He recut it to make it as vulgar and suggestive as possible, and it was reasonably successful. It was never treated as anything but a joke after that.
Most of this is derived from Wikipedia, but I remember seeing the film myself in the 70s and having a good chuckle. it is so over the top and we all knew that smoking pot didn’t lead to any of these terrible things.
I don't know what the pie chart of hobo drug use was exactly (does anyone?), I was refuting Melvin's statement that alcohol was the only drug the average hobo had access to and that meth was nowhere to be found. (By the way, alcohol remains the most popular drug of abuse.)
My point about Reefer Madness was that cannabis was available and not some exotic secret.
I suspect that it feels far more disordered to us when instead of hearing about some miscreants being pursued by police we are told that the authorities are actively allowing some bad thing to happen and society is going off the rails.
In the previous media/social ecosystem most journalism had to write for people with a range of political views and we heard opinions from friends on the other side. This meant that when you read this stories you would often come away with the sense: ok I really don't like X government policy but I at least understand that it is the result of people in good faith struggling to achieve goals I can understand. When you only hear it described from one side it feels like society itself is unraveling and since you don't even understand the kind of concerns that motivate the other side you start to become the caricature the other side has of you.
If the media you consume doesn't present the concerns opponents of voter ID laws have in a non-caricatured way it just seems like people are challenging the very idea only citizens should vote and society is falling apart. If the concerns about how campaign finance laws limiting corporate spending would apply to entities like the NYT isn't raised it feels like SCOTUS is just corruptly handing power to big buisness. In response you get heated and demand simplistic responses that wipe away that corruption and lawlessness which become even more grist for amplification.
I don't have a good solution because once you've left the stable region of the system you get pushed further and further away. The incentivizes favor even more simplistic partisan coverage, less cross-tribe friendships and continually amplify the sense that society is spinning out of control.
Couldn't another explanation be the internet making people aware of societies that have less crime, and realizing that the current rate (down relatively as it is) is still intolerably high compared to east asia, let alone western europe? Dovetails into the "Japan trip" phenomenon I've heard discussed recently where people become more visibly authoritarian after visiting Japan and being impressed by their society.
Maybe a little? I actually have hosted two Japanese friends before when they came to the states. I don't think any of them had really *political* takeaways like Americans going to Japan often get. But both of them were surprised by the extreme friendliness, casualness, and lack of inhibitions of Americans, I think in a good way. Strangers striking up conversations at random for example.
Also they really, really, really liked shooting guns.
It's harder for the rest of the world to get America-pilled, because the rest of the world already knows what's going on in America, and America barely knows what's going on beyond its own borders.
That said, occasionally people will visit America and realise all the good things that you haven't been sharing with us, like diner breakfasts, and American-style BBQ, and fish tacos. OK I just realised all my examples were food.
Have you heard of Paris Syndrome? It's a legitimate phenomenon where Japanese people go to France expecting a civilized, cultured society, and then have a mental breakdown because of how utterly terrible Paris is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_syndrome
Shoplifting seems very vulnerable to equilibrium effects -- that is, if the rate of shoplifting goes up then either targeted businesses fail or they engage in some form of costly mitigation.
If you walked into a chain retailer near me in 2019, hardly anything was locked up -- just a few high value, small items like razor blades or electronics. Now they lock up half the products in the store. The CVS near me locks up the pints of ice cream. That's costly and annoying for them and costs sales, but it probably works so you end up with businesses and customers suffering but the shoplifting stats don't reflect it.
Regarding homelessness, I don't think your summary of "up 25% from generational lows, and equal to the 1990s" is accurate, at least not for large and salient metros.
Since 1983, the NYC shelter population has increased from about 13,000 to over 90,000 today, about a 7x increase, while the overall city population has grown about 25%.
Looking at the Seattle sweep data you posted, if we take the frequency of sweeps as an (admittedly imperfect) proxy for the amount of homelessness (or at least how much of a visible problem it is, prompting the sweeps), there were 29 sweeps in 2008 (the earliest year in chart you linked to), and 2196 in 2023 (the most recent year). This is probably an over-estimate of the actual increase in homelessness, but it does point to something (much) larger than a 25% increase from generational lows.
This is more in line with people's reported experiences and anecdotal evidence. There are many credible reports of large homeless encampments in towns and cities where homelessness was almost unheard of in the past.
That's a great point and also tracks NYC's own official data (I'm not sure where the comptroller's report gets the "120,000" figure, since their own stats for that period seem to hover a little less than 100,000, but it is also possible that they are including a second data set from somewhere other than traditional shelters)- https://comptroller.nyc.gov/services/for-the-public/charting-homelessness-in-nyc/overview/
Not sure where Claude is pulling numbers from but that seems misleading at best.
To augment #4, I would think that the measuring of disorder is going to lag behind the ways that development of disorder manifest themselves.
We note that littering is down. But there is a stronger social stigma today against littering (brought around by public campaigns against it) that was not present mid century. So, should we take the W? Well, I'm not sure if that's a success story of reducing disorder versus playing whack-a-mole with various forms of disorder.
Smoking is much reduced from that time period. Is that because of a general increase in public healthy behaviors or a specific campaign? My suspicion is the latter.
If you asked someone in 1980 what signs of disorder were, they probably wouldn't have mentioned encampments in city parks. But today, we all recognize that as a sign of disorder.
That doesn't mean that disorder hasn't decreased, but it's hard to demonstrate that by pointing to yesterday's fashionable forms of disorder. To look at the other examples, it would be like saying traffic is reduced because there aren't as many horses on the streets.
I worked retail security once, at a store in a bad neighborhood. The shrink was ~5%, as compared to ~1.5% nationwide. It's absolutely possible that certain stores in SF have a vastly higher shoplifting rate compared to the national average, as well as trends that don't match the national average trends. It's also possible that people will highlight such stores when talking about crime, while ignoring the broader trends.
The actual disorder around here I wish the police would do something more about is crazy people wandering around shouting aggressively. Most of the homeless people around here seem fine, and I don't see drug stuff being left around, but there's a few crazy angry ones who go shouting (either at people or at nothing in particular) and who probably ought to be charged with disturbing the peace or something...
Theory Four is incredibly compelling to me. The more I learn about the past the more I realize that most people have completely garbage intuitions for what the past was actually like. I hit up the excellent Storyville Museum in New Orleans recently and it's incredible how much people romanticize horrible things. Heck, I saw the premiere of Paradise Square in Berkeley, the whole musical is just a complete romanticization of the worst slum in NYC. I'm pretty sure you've written in your old blog about the prevalance of domestic terrorism in the 70s and it's barely a blip in people's consciousnesses now. I even read somewhere a compelling argument that 21st century Americans' impressions about the 50s and 60s are based more on sitcoms (which obviously had to be squeaky clean and network approved) than actual real life.
In Back to the Future, the clean idyllic and colourful world of the 1950s is contrasted against the dark, grimy, crime-ridden world of the "present" 1980s.
But now we make nostalgia films about the 1980s and the 1980s is clean, idyllic and colourful.
The blogger "agnostic" had a series at GNXP tagged as "previous generations were more depraved" https://www.gnxp.com/blog/labels/previous%20generations%20were%20more%20depraved.php showing much more criminal & reckless the 80s were. Then when he created his own blog, he started complaining about how the declining crime of the modern era made it culturally lamer than the 80s. I used to comment there to criticize his posts, but he started holding all comments for his approval to let through or not and eventually declared a limit of one per post https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2021/07/13/a-comment-agnostic-has-not-let-through-under-his-post-on-elite-overproduction/ He embraced a lot of kooky populism, and was dead certain that Biden couldn't beat Trump even if he cheated because some theory of historical cycles required Trump to start a new counter-Reagan era (he eventually changed his mind to declare that Trump was more of a McKinley/Carter figure and some left-populist after him must kick off the new era).
Any stats coming out of California are suspect beyond belief. They, and other blue states, have no incentive to be truthful. Where I live crime has gone up a great deal. And they lie about it.
The issue with both this, and the previous, analysis is this:
You are comparing levels to what they used to be, rather than to what they would have been in that time period if they had the technology we have today.
If somebody shoplifted in the 1990s, you might have a grainy black and white recording of the act which might or might not allow you to actually identify the person, and maybe a witness who might be able to identify somebody in a lineup IF you can luck out and find the person who did it - certainly not enough to identify and find them. If somebody stole a package from your porch, you almost certainly didn't have a recording. A certain level of crime was accepted, not because the crime was acceptable, but because there wasn't a realistic way of catching the criminals in the act of committing any given crime; rather, the expectation was that they'd slip up and get caught sooner or later.
Whereas today, it is basically routine in many places to catch people in the act of committing crimes with high-definition video that affirmatively identifies the person and the crime itself, and then for the government to do nothing about it. -This- is what most of the right-wing commentary is focusing on, and this represents a far greater level of perceptible civil disorder than an apparently identical level of crime which exists because of a lack of evidence rather than a lack of enforcement.
The problem isn't necessarily that shoplifting, or other crimes, have gone up relative to some point in the past, but that crime is significantly more common than there is any reason for.
1. we directly perceive more crime (because we have better surveillance equipment)
2. the government does less about it (despite more evidence produced by the better surveillance equipment)
If both those things were true, I agree it would at least be evidence of the government becoming incompetent, which one might reasonably argue is a sign of civil disorder.
(1) on its own would be more viable as an argument that perceptions of increased crime are incorrect; that crime has actually stayed the same or gone down, just increased visibility creates the illusion it has gone up.
(2) is an empirical claim, though I'm not sure if good data exists for it. Still, you made the claim--maybe you have good data for it?
I would say, rather, that the government does about the same about it (hence the rates staying relatively stable over time), it's just that reasons for low government investment in dealing with the problems no longer stand up to scrutiny. This may or may not represent increasing incompetence, but it certainly represents more visible incompetence.
But no, I don't have good data for it, only an ever-increasing hill, soon to be a mountain, of anecdotal evidence.
I think the decline of public order is distinct from crime, sometimes it gets cheered on, as when people celebrate graffiti artists. One big difference between the present and the old days is that nobody criticizes anyone else’s bad behavior in public any more. I’m not sure how to turn that around.
All the stuff Scott mentions, the only thing I call out is people listening to loud videos on their phone indoors. Some people react with surprise as if they didn’t think they could be heard at the next table.
An explanation Scott doesn't consider is that people confuse levels with rates of change, observe that crime or graffiti or trash are high, meaning higher than they should be, and conclude that they are rising. You see that pattern in views on inflation. People observe that prices are high, describe that as high inflation, even if the increase occurred in the past and prices are not currently rising.
1. One easy answer to why so many people think that crime in the US is going up is that it is, at least on the sorts of timescales on which people remember. It's true that crime is down on a year-by-year basis, but the last five years have had much higher crime than the five years before, and it's perfectly reasonable that normal people without their noses buried in statistics are going to notice the five-year increase without noticing the one-year decrease.
2. I think absolute quantity of disorder is less annoying than official tolerance of disorder. If bad stuff is happening and the authorities are doing their best to quell it then that's not too outrageous, but if bad stuff is happening and the authorities have given up trying to do anything about it, or have decided that bad thing is Good Actually and you're a bad person for complaining about it, then that's more outrageous. The US in my experience doesn't have exceptionally high levels of disorder but it does have exceptionally high levels of official tolerance of disorder.
I think you're off base here: "... This feels wrong to me: people aren’t comparing the present to the golden age of 2019, they’re comparing it to the golden age of their parents and grandparents’ generation. So let’s take a longer view..."
Everyone I know IS comparing the present to 2019, at least in NYC.
Disorder is way up in New York, especially in my nabe which is an expensive part of Manhattan.
Drug dealers, addicts passed out (or dead) on the streets, scary crazy people, etc were virtually unknown where I live prior to the Summer of Love Riots in 2020.
Shoplifting is likely down not because of a decrease in desire or the crimminal population, but that everything of value is locked up. In major retailers you push a button, hear the announcement over the PA and hope someone shows up to give you access to bandaids or whatever.
In additiion, some retailers have security near the entrance, including an armed guard (sometimes an off duty cop).
I've known more than a few people involved in assaults and exactly zero of them reported anything to the police. These were people trained in martial arts and they won their fights (or got away) and felt the cops couldn't (or wouldn't) do anything and so didn't bother.
In Tokyo, everything is a suicide. A man gets mugged, and dies of a bullet wound. Obvious suicide, because he was suddenly impoverished and unable to take care of his family.
Suicide, in general, is at about triple the rate of homicide, and that'll hide a good number of bodies.
In America, can we really be sure that anything less visible than a bullet wound is ruled a murder? You haven't bothered to collect dark-web statistics on "claimed assassinations." And enough of them are either ruled "death by natural causes" or suicide to fox the numbers.
Is it just that "Industrial/Political Murder" has gotten more subtle? When a failed political operative winds up floating in the reflecting pool, it gets called suicide, doesn't it?
In America, pretty much every death of someone under 75 and not already being treated for something likely to kill them, gets an autopsy. The exact rules differ from state to state, but it will be something like that. And it's really, really hard to fake a murder in a way that the coroner won't pretty much immediately peg as a murder. Everything you can come up with, they as a community have seen a thousand times and turned it into a checklist item.
So, yes, we can be pretty sure we are getting approximately all of the murders.
First off, you don't know much about poisons. Start with Rolemaster, there's never something they don't do a comprehensive "here's the basics" on.
An autopsy is VERY DIFFERENT from a full autopsy. Have a drink with a coroner and get 'em to tell you the difference.
It's not really hard to fake a death from natural causes, using a variety of poisons. Hell, you can even get someone's balls to rot off, and STILL get it called "natural causes" (probably need someone in prison, mind you, but still!).
A comedian died less than a year ago, "peacefully in his sleep" -- after having suffered blunt trauma to the back of the head. Let's see, do you think they investigated that for murder? No, no they did not.
Aw, hell. That's two different comedians (Trevor death's a few years older, mind). Ya still wanna say they weren't murdered? Ya sure? Awful coincidental, don't it be?
There are numerous claimed "natural causes" or suicide deaths that are actually claimed, on the darkweb, as murders/assassinations. Navalny may ring a bell? Coroner says he died of one thing, America's now claiming he died of something legitimately weird, odd, and not particularly fitting of the Russian MO. Mind you, the day after he died, his wife was giving a "moving speech" to a Security Conference. A prewritten speech.
Trevor Moore and Bob Saget. I'm not saying they were murdered (Although Bob Saget's family did not help by saying he died "sleeping peacefully." Generally when people say "died instantly in a car crash" they don't mean it, either, but at least that's a well known lie.)
But when you listen to enough "natural causes" deaths, watch enough critical personnel die, you don't close the door so easily.
I still think the main reason is priming. The tolerance for crime and disorder is lowering with the development of society, so "crime and disorder rate feels higher" means "... feels much higher than it should be".
I can't really compare to my own youth because I grew up in communism, and there crime was way lower for various reasons.
If you step outside Lighthaven and start walking north towards one of the restaurants near the UC Berkeley campus, you will pass multiple hobos on the sidewalk over about a five-block walk.
For someone walking down this stretch of sidewalk, there is a big jump discontinuity in the vibes when going from 0 hobos to 1 hobo. Going from 1 -> 2 hobos is less of a vibe change, even though the number of hobos has technically doubled. Going from 2 -> 4 hobos is also not as much of a worsening in the vibes, even though the number has doubled again. (The vibe worsens with more hobos, but not nearly as much as it does when going from 0 to 1.)
So even if the number of hobos on the sidewalk decreases from, say, 5 down to 2 (a 60% drop) the vibes have not improved by all that much. There are still hobos. You still feel unsafe.
There can also be an element of "grunginess" in an environment that isn't strictly litter or graffiti. For example, if there are cracks in the sidewalk. The concrete is dirty and dark grey, and covered in black chewing gum spots. And again, as with the hobos, there's a step change from going from zero litter to a little bit of litter, and not as much to go from a little to a lot of litter.
Loved this post and the one yesterday! I particularly love the potential reason for it that you put at the end of the list on yesterday's post (that maybe crime rates are going down because all the people who would be doing crimes are sitting at home watching tiktok videos, browsing instagram, or playing video games instead. I don't have data to back this up, but this really rings true to me. I would actually not be surprised at all if this is a major cause of crime rates going down.
I also totally agree that crime and the kinds of small-time disorderliness that bother me have gone down over recent years.
And I definitely don't like feeling despair all the time. (I do kind of think another activity that has replaced some old-fashioned disorderliness in young people (replaced drinking, smoking, driving recklessly, having unprotected sex, vandalism, etc) is despair. I think a lot of people are not doing disorderly things because instead they are sitting at home despairing and contemplating suicide, and that's terrible.)
However, I do think there are some kinds of disorder that have gone up a lot in the past twenty years. For example:
- Number of felonies the president elect has been convicted of on the day they were elected has gone up drastically in the past decade.
- Federal government deporting immigrants from one country to a mega-prison in another country without any kind of due process is, uh. I don't know if this used to happen more, but I certainly didn't hear about anything like this. (Though this might be just a thing of "we now hear about more crimes".)
- And there's the UHC CEO shooter. Like I have no love for UHC or its CEO (I heard it was one of the worst health insurance companies for unethically denying claims and that its then CEO was a large part of the reason for this. I have no idea whether this is true, but even if it is), but like, the swell of support for him being gunned down in the street feels... Kinda disorderly?
- Measles vaccination rates have gone down and measles rates have gone up in the US in the past three years. A lot. And okay, I am comparing to the halcyon days of 2020 when I say that (there was measles everywhere in 1960), but I think a lot has actually happened in the past 20 years that is disorderly and isn't just about comparing 2026 to the halcyon days of 2020. Like there's just more confusion. And of course being confused is better than being confidently wrong, so I'm not saying confusion itself is a bad thing, but it is disorderly, right?
(For my first 3 points, I guess what I'm saying is, they are isolated crimes (whatever President Trump was convicted of, the deportation to CECOT, and the UHC CEO shooting), but it's the level of support for those crimes that feel disorderly. I had to drive by multiple "I'm Voting for the Convicted Felon" flags on my way to work every day, and that felt very disorderly to me.)
Focusing on a small piece here but- why are we still using graffiti as a proxy for crime (edit: or disorder)? The bay is full of gorgeous murals that were made by kids who once had their fun by tagging things. Making their clumsy mark on the world, then growing up and making their city beautiful.
Obviously tagging the wrong place (active storefront) is obnoxious and costly, but it feels wrong to sit in an ivory tower and use the statistics on that as a proxy for social decay. For a lot of cities, especially towards the outskirts, graffiti is a welcome sight
What percentage of graffiti would you say is beautiful art that improves the neighborhood? Also, how many of those beautiful murals are actually graffiti, meaning put in place without the consent of the building owner?
A person who puts a beautiful painting on my car without my consent is still a vandal.
Most graffiti isnt beautiful, and none of the murals are graffiti. But i moreso meant that the artists responsible for that art often have graffiti in their history.
But like- to try and stay on topic- The thumbnail of this post is a random concrete door in what appears to be maybe a desolate alleyway or some other urban liminal space.
It looks like the PERFECT place to do this. And in practice, this is where graffiti often lives, at least in my city- under bridges, on run down or unkempt property, etc.
Vandalism would be a better metric. Some graffiti is indeed vandalism but not all of it, or at least not in a way that meaningfully indicates "disorder"
Two other forms of disorder that I've experienced: street harassment of people challenging me to fights and panhandlers looking more mentally disturbed. These won't show up in crime stats because I change my behavior to avoid getting into those fights, but that's still a tax on me.
Could another factor be increased travel since the 1960s? Nowadays people are more likely to have visited a city or country where approximately none of this disorder happens, and their familiar amount of disorder seems large in comparison? Even if it’s only some fraction of people who have traveled and noticed this, those people could influence the overall vibes.
I feel like public life is just dumpier these days in a way that gives people a negative feeling, and they take out that negative feeling on the homeless.
Service workers are frequently rude and unprofessional. A lot of businesses feel like ghost towns. People walking by you on the street seem withdrawn and cold: nobody is friendly. Dress standards in public have gone down. Cities pursue maintenance projects in a way that seems apathetic to antagonistic towards how the public receives them. People are just holistically antisocial and are glued to their phones a lot.
Because of this, when I spend a lot of time in broader society, I just get the vague feeling that society is dumpy and trashy in a way that did not used to be the case. Therefore, when I see a homeless person, this feels like the ultimate confirmation of this prior. What my brain is picking up on is something broader than just 'homeless people', but if I was a less self-aware person, I could see myself thinking that what I feel in public was just 'too much disorder', and not something broader than this.
If public spaces felt brighter, more social, and more connected, graffiti and crazy homeless people would be easier to tolerate. In the current status quo, a lot of public life is already pretty sucky outside of disorder, so seeing graffiti, homeless people, and litter pushes it over the edge.
There's a recurring point that pops up, at least in reference to NYC, that a ~10% subset of the homeless population are "super-perpetrators" that commit ~90% of the violations by the homeless population as a whole. This does hit to disorder versus crime, but also begs the question of whether the visibility of a crime should be measured in some way. Statistics are great and often our best way of evaluating issues on any level above one's own personal experience, but they are not without blind spots. Someone defecating by an underpass near the city limits is different from someone doing so in Times Square.
I don't how aggregate stats on this shake out over the last two decades, but I can say that the last 2-3 years have had a number of incidents with naked or semi-naked vagrants screaming, defecating, or passed out on a subway platform. A number of high-traffic stations have permanent/semi-permanent encampments on the platform, with zonked-out derelicts surrounded by litter (not talking about the unlicensed vendors or beggars).
This is not representative of my experience for the preceding two decades or so. There have always been folks asleep in the subway cars and everyone has had the lurching horror of seeing an empty subway car roll up in an otherwise packed train and wondering whether it's a broken AC or a vagrant with the kind of BO you can cut with a knife. But this seems qualitatively different. You don't need a homeless population in the thousands if the same dozen or so individuals keep shitting on the escalator where 100k people commute every morning. This isn't local color. This isn't how it used to be. And stats pointing out that there are fewer piles of garbage bags on the street don't hit the root of the matter when you see a soiled bedsheet flapping around someone's turd in midtown on a midweek afternoon.
Disorder is easy to map. It's the destruction of family, and I mean F is for Family. I mean, you don't even really GET the comedy about family anymore. National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. How you got a cousin who's a walking embarrassment, but he's your cousin so you put up with hit.
Hypothesis: what if public disorder, its harms and/or its perceptions, scale with population size? That is, perhaps we should be looking at absolute numbers and not normalizing it per capita. If the population size quadruples and graffiti rates halve per capita, there will be twice as much graffiti around. Same with littering, or boombox carriers, or harassing psychos on the train. You will be less likely to be the personal target of a crime that only affects one person, but you will be more likely to be witness incidents that have audiences, because there are more people causing incidents to wider audiences.
This wouldn't do much to explain short-term effects from 2020 to 2025, but would explain long-term effects, and unfortunately make them mostly unsolvable unless you're a NIMBY.
Maybe the discussion about crime is really about social atomisation.
It's not exactly a secret that life today is very atomised by historical standards -- more people with few or no friends, a greater expectation that you'll move from place to place as your career demands, weaker civil society, fewer extended families, etc. If you don't know the people you come across in your day-to-day life (so everyone is an unknown, and therefore potentially hostile, quantity), and you don't have a meaningful family/friend support network to fall back on, it's not surprising that you should feel a heightened sense of danger, even if this isn't statistically justified. Conversely, if you live in one of ye olde tight-knit communities, where you know basically everyone (at least by sight) and, if you do become a victim of crime, your parents/brother/cousin/friends will be there to help you out, you'll likely feel more at ease.
The obvious theory to me: Conservatives are seen as 'tough on crime' and rely on the narrative that crime and disorder are all around us, we're in a period of conservative backlash against liberals/progressives (especially in this/Scott's media ecosystem, I suspect), therefore lots of people report high crime and disorder.
Part of the problem with a two-party system is that everything ends up getting correlated and identified with one side or the other. And part of the problem with polarized, high-political-engagement times is that everyone thinks about the world in political terms.
For things people have direct personal knowledge and experience about, they can sometimes manage to believe their own lying eyes over the narratives that signal allegiance to their ideology and tribe.
But for people who have not been the victim of a crime and have no direct personal access to the statistics other than reading about them, to people who spend their lives online and don't go outside often enough to get a good statistical sample of how much 'disorder' there is in the first place: ideological adherence is absolutely sufficient (I claim) to explain the general perception.
Further evidence: I'm (imprecisely binned as) a progressive, and I don't think crime or disorder are up at all, nor that they're pressing problems for most people.
A bunch of people in this comment thread and the preceding one have noted "well I lived in big city X and directly experienced or witnessed the following string of crimes" and a bunch of others have noted the opposite. The plural of these anecdotes is that America has a lot of crime, but not an overwhelming and omnipresent amount and individual results may vary. People don't experience aggregates, they experience "I tried living in city Y and every few months someone stole my bike or broke into my car or took my package or tried to fight me as I was walking home from work, and this seems sub-optimal as a way to run a big city." Or "I lived in city Z and nothing bad happened, guess everything is OK." But if lots of people have the first experience it suggests we still have a problem to solve even if aggregates are less bad than before.
Theory: this is generalized future anxiety, cashing out in post-hoc rationalizations. It has increased because the future is becoming less predictable, not because the present sucks.
When people can see on their screens or in real life the level of orderliness in huge metropolises in Asia, in say Japan, Korea, China, what they get at home seems like a miserable policy failure even if things are better than they were 30 years ago in the same way if a neighboring country electrified while your country was still in the dark you’d think something has gone very wrong even if life was 20% better than the past.
People have bad intuitions for change over time but are fairly decent at invidious comparisons in the present. People *want* to have Japan levels of public orderliness and the fact it exists in real life in huge cities makes them incredulous regarding explanations as to why it’s impossible to achieve here, and don’t find “well it’s better than before” a compelling substitute.
Other theory: People are dissatisfied with order and with their increasingly regulated lives. They don't understand how this can be the case since they consider social order the greatest good. So their dissatisfaction must be due to disorder or crime leading to more clinging to order leading to more dissatisfaction leading to more suppression of deviance leading to more order leading to more dissatisfaction.
My thought relates to Putnam’s Bowling Alone book from 2000.
People don’t go out as much as they once did. Therefore they rely on media stories about various disorder categories. If it bleeds it leads.
You see this in lots of areas. My finances are good but other’s are bad. I don’t see homeless people but they’re everywhere. Most live in safe, clean suburbs but see awful things happening every day on the internet.
> People don’t go out as much as they once did. Therefore they rely on media stories about various disorder categories
How do we know that people don't go out as much as they once did? Should we be any more trustful of the "that people don't go out as much as they once did" narrative than the "crime keeps going up" narrative?
Attendance at church services are down, lodges and clubs are disappearing, movie theaters are failing. Golf courses are disappearing. Most people can’t name the person 3 houses away. Teens having less sex. Lots of pointers in that direction.
This feels wrong to me: people aren’t comparing the present to the golden age of 2019, they’re comparing it to the golden age of their parents and grandparents’ generation. So let’s take a longer view.
When I see people making the argument that crime really is up they mostly do in fact seem to be describing recent trends. Esp re shoplifting.
If they are in fact comparing to their parents and grandparents time, they are just making uninformed guesses. If something new is happening here it would be why do ppl feel like they can correctly make this comparison.
Put me in the camp of "of course things are better and the stats agree what are any of you even talking about" but maybe SF just really sucks
During the Iraq war I heard and really liked the song "eve of destruction" but then thought of the absurdity of replaying a doom predicting song to a situation 40 years after its release.
Isn't this a function of the spread of anti-theft devices in shops? I personally don't know how common shoplifting is but I can tell how often they've got those plastic barriers and I need to ask the staff just to buy some toilet paper and beer - and if I see those in every shop today where I didn't before, then I assume that shoplifting rates are going to the moon
This street-lights the issues where there's a good body of data to analyze. But perhaps it tends to be the very issues where there is not a good way to collect data, where the issue is hardest to correct and people feel these in the vibes.
> (I support the death penalty for boom box carriers)
I understand this statement is hyperbole made in jest, and I even agree with the broader sentiment (loud music in public places makes it difficult for me to think or speak, both things I would rather have the freedom to do), but I cannot help but point out that it's possible someone acting in bad faith could accuse you of racism for this statement alone, for the following reason:
Do The Right Thing (1989) is a fairly well known movie directed by Spike Lee (SPOILERS AHEAD) in which a black character, Radio Raheem, is seen carrying a boom box blasting "Fight the Power" by Public Enemy through the streets of New York, culminating in an altercation at a pizzeria where the owner destroys his boom box, a fight breaks out, the police are called, and Radio Raheem is ultimately choked to death by a white cop. After this, the main character, Mookie (played by Spike Lee himself), throws a trash can through the window of the pizzeria, causing a riot in which the pizzeria burns down but nobody is shown to be killed. Many other things happen in the movie but that's the main plot.
The title of the film is in reference to the trash can being thrown, and the film is deliberately ambiguous about whether Mookie "did the right thing" (with the small caveat that Spike Lee claims only white people ever ask him that question), but crystal clear that Radio Raheem should not have died as a result of the events that led up to the riot.
I am not accusing you of racism for being ignorant of this film or its implications. I wasn't aware of it myself until quite recently; I said "fairly well known" earlier as a general statement, since the film has had a lasting legacy, as evidenced by it having been screened at my local cinema in current year. I just wanted to warn you that you might want to be careful with statements like the one above, which I could see particularly vindictive journalists or other pundits latching on to as a reason to criticize your worldview.
OK, I’ve been ruminating about racism for a while and you’ve triggered an avalanche. But I will try to keep it small.
Sometimes a group of people develop a passionate hatred of another group, and feel their hatred to be so appropriate that it justifies committing atrocities against the group, including exterminating them. That phenomenon is a terrible evil, and if racism is thinking and behaving that way towards people of another race, I am absolutely in favor of aggressively calling out racists, outing them, ejecting them from groups and fucking smacking them in the face. But I do not think that having some quite negative thoughts about something members of a certain group do more frequently than other people, or having a certain aversion to members of a group is abnormal, or the product of grotesquely screwed up thinking, or extremely evil.
I have probably entertained negative thoughts about every group there is, and I definitely have had negative thoughts and felt at least mild aversion toward members of every single goddam group you are not supposed to have those reactions to: blacks, gays, trans people, disabled people, women. Am I leaving out any group I am supposed to open my heart to and view in a way that is judgment-free? Name one, and I guarantee you I have looked at members of that group and thought “yuck.”
It is natural to experience that state of mind regarding people who are noticeably different from oneself. All animals are neophobic, and we are no exception. Furthermore, part of identity is cultural affiliation, and part of cultural affiliation is a feeling that people not of one’s culture are weird and/or inferior. On top of that, people of other cultures are harder to read, so it is easy to develop an inaccurate picture of them. Generally, getting to know some members of the unfamiliar group makes many of my dumb, simplistic negative takes on the group fade away. Until that happens, the best I have been able to do is to remind myself energetically of the illusions that are probably clouding my judgment. I am pretty sure that the personal reactions I'm describing are very common. I'm inclined to think they are almost universal.
I am rarely out in the city these days, and do not know whether blacks blast boom boxes more often than non-blacks. But let’s say Scott’s irritated mental movies about people blasting boom boxes almost always feature a black guy as the culprit. Why is that so terrible? Why is it terrible even if it’s inaccurate and nowadays whites, blacks, hispanics and asians are equally represented among boom box blasters? Do you really believe your own spontaneous mental movies represent situations with perfect accuracy and fairness? Do you really think anybody’s do? I am pretty sure that if Scott was writing a piece where race was tangentially involved he would watch own mind for dumb takes that were set off by negative images of blacks with boom boxes, black pimps in movies, whatever. He would do a good job of straining out his own race-related bullshit in formulating his take. I am pretty sure that Scott listens to his black patients as attentively as he does his white ones. I am pretty sure that if Scott came upon someone black who had just been injured in a hit and run he would feel compassion and do his best to help the person. And things of that kind are what you can reasonably expect from real people.
This world where good people never feel aversion or fear or disapproval for strutting young black males with blasting boom boxes, nose-picking people with developmental disability, beefy gay men in drag, etc etc does not exist. It’s a piece of nonsense, like the world of The Sound of Music.
I don't disagree with anything you've said. In fact, given that Do The Right Thing shows multiple black characters blasting boom boxes and no white characters doing so, viewers may come out of it with that association being stronger rather than weaker. It's a complicated movie with moral grey areas that I oversimplified to make my point, which is that I could see a potential argument in favor of negatively interpreting Scott's words through a racist lens. I think that's a bad faith take as I've said, and I did not mean to imply anything about aspiring toward a "perfect" worldview in which cognitive bias doesn't exist, although I see now how my words may have inadvertently nudged in that direction.
Well, the part of what you said that I disagree with is that you seem to think it is a good idea to steer clear of anything that woke nitwits could call racism. I think it is better to go ahead and say or write the thing that is going to make the woke peanut gallery squeal and bring out the handcuffs, and then say your own version of what I wrote above.
Which is why I advised Scott to be careful. I didn't outright say not to make such statements, and the intent of my original post was to provide context should Scott find himself in a position where he needs to defend that statement.
If that quote is "racist", then perhaps it's time to stop pretending that the word matters any more. People can hurl whatever baseless insults they want, it doesn't matter because Scott has more clout than them.
Have you considered looking at this from a revealed preference angle? Maybe we could see if the spending habits of profit-maximizing firms could provide a better thermometer than crime statistics. When there is a conflict between the vibes and the data, look at the market behavior. There are some early data points that seem compelling to me:
According to https://capitaloneshopping.com/research/shoplifting-statistics - Between 2019 and 2023, 69% of retailers increased their use of merchandise-locking cages, cases, or hooks. In 2023, 75% of retailers added or increased uniformed security officers, and 67% added measures to lock or secure merchandise. From 2019 to 2023, 64% of retailers added positions within their loss prevention teams, and 42% increased budgets for third-party security officers.
Maybe some data sets that would be helpful: total loss-prevention operating expenditure as a percentage of revenue, broken out by metro area, over 10-15+ years. I don't think this exists, the closest proxy might be publicly traded security firms whose revenue growth by segment could serve as a rough proxy (if retail security guard contracts are growing faster than commercial or residential, it could mean something).
- Deterrence tech has gotten far cheaper. AI camera systems, RFID tags, etc. are all getting down a steep cost curve. A $50k system might cost $10k now.
- Political cover exists for something they have always wanted to do. Post-2020 theft narrative has let them take action to capture new profit and close stores that had lower margins.
- Self-checkout might be the real driver. If a big chunk of the increased LP spend is actually about self-checkout loss, then the locked cases we see might be solving a different problem. Visible security could be a response to a back-office inventory problem vs. a street-level disorder problem.
- Insurance and liability requirements: maybe insurers are demanding theft deterrent as a condition of coverage, or the litigation environment around employee safety during theft incidents has changed. 73% of retailers reporting "increased aggression during theft events" might change that liability calculus.
- Contagion and arms-race: once Target locks up detergent, shoplifters move on to the next store: redistribution of theft means each store's individual decision to invest in deterrence is rational, but in aggregate reflects the same amount of theft just sloshing around.
It’s easy to note that crime and disorder trends are not evenly distributed. A doubling of the murder rate in a city’s safest neighborhood is unlikely to register, and commentators to this discussion would not notice the direction of crime in ghettos that they never have reason to be present in. A plausible hypothesis is that a higher sense of disorder in contrast to the statistics relates to two types of troublesome areas. One is clearly the business districts across the country which hyperbolically seem to have more homeless people than suits due to wfh. Here areas are depressing and certainly give an impression of rot. The other areas are the ‘edge’ neighborhoods- those places that border higher crime areas but that tend to draw gentrifying young, culture, bars, restaurants due to reasonable rents. When crime shot up driving Covid, these neighborhoods faced a novel situation and a shock, resulting in large disinvestment and empty storefronts post the big crime spillover from bad neighborhoods. These neighborhoods in my city have not recovered. Taking a step back, these are areas suburbanites and local urbanites were used to visiting and often are avatars for the health of a city. And now they are much worse.
The disconnect between frequency and perception might dissolve if you measure disorder not as incident count but as the energy cost of processing divergent descriptions of shared space.
Three things can make disorder feel worse even when incidents decline:
(1) the institutional maintenance of shared baselines erodes — postwar public order was an actively funded achievement, not a default, and when the funding declined the expectation persisted as cultural memory while the infrastructure supporting it decohered;
(2) gentrification moved people with sharply peaked expectations of public space into environments that violate those expectations, raising the per-encounter processing cost even at constant frequency;
(3) the technology for imposing involuntary coordination demands on strangers improved (better speakers, smartphones broadcasting on transit) while social norms against confrontation weakened the tools for resisting those demands.
People aren't miscounting incidents. They're accurately reporting that the cost of maintaining their own description of normal in public space has gone up.
How much of this is connected to aging population? Not only in the "less crime prone young men" way, but also in the "when I was young" and "young people these days"sense?
It's not some great mystery. People's "lived experience" is not their lived experience, it's cable news, Facebook, TikTok. People are gorging themselves on media experiences that make them feel bad and then looking for epistemic reasons to tell themselves that this is reality and not something they can just stop subjecting themselves to.
Theory 5: Crime has long been used in America to stoke racist fears and manufacture public support for increased policing as well as other policies that hurt the working class. Hence, a media-landscape serving bourgeois interests (whether directly such as Bezos owning the Washington Post, or indirectly such as Alex Jones gaining sales money from "Support Your Local Ice Raids" T-shirts) is invested in perpetuating the fear of crime.
It may be an example of European influence on American beliefs. Europe really is less safe and more messy now than it was in the relatively recent past. And also, there is in both Europe and the US a general feeling that things are not going in the right direction. This too can influence crime perceptions
>Finally, theory four: the squalor and disorder of the past took different forms than the squalor and disorder of the present.
Mostly that. A lot of things that are considered antisocial todays were absolutely the norm in the 60's-80's: throwing garbage by your car's window, smoking inside, etc. Then it stopped being something normal that everyone did, and instead became disorder that antisocial people did. It may have been cut by a factor of 10, but the disorder aspect went from non-existent to "all of it".
Thinking of the recent trend of locking goods up in retail stores, pharmacy and other store closures in SF, the drug action around city hall, and the growing homeless problem despite enormous (useless) increase in spending to address the problem.
- 200dB is so loud that in normal atmospheric conditions it is beyond the point at which the rarefaction segment is a perfect vacuum (194dB); once a perfect vacuum is hit a louder sound can't happen.
- The stereo you heard was probably only 150dB, about the limit which loud music fans can briefly tolerate music to exist.
There's definitely a major part of the trend due to cultural changes and especially the mixing of cultures that were previously separated.
For instance white/WASP-y American culture used to be *much* more conformist and focused on clean orderliness. Not universally of course (it's what the hippies were rebelling against), but -- my impression is that all across America, middle class strivers were seeking that form of security and order. Moving to the suburbs had a lot to do with that. Put those same subculture back in contact with rowdier subcultures, homelessness, drug epidemics, downtown sketchiness, media-driven narratives about epidemics of crime, etc.. And they get the impression that they are considerably less safe, because they're not as insulated anymore.
So I feel like the main mechanism in general of the perception change is 'increased heterogeneity'. Combine with homelessness and drug problems producing major categories of 'visible' crime (as opposed to, like white collar stuff that doesn't make anyone feel unsafe), and you get a general feeling of disorder that wasn't there before.
When I moved to San Francisco in 2021, in the span of about a year I personally saw a half dozen thefts at Walgreens. I don't spend a lot of time at Walgreens! So the fact I saw that many meant it was happening a LOT.
I found it pretty funny. Sad, but funny too, with the security guard helplessly following the person around as they stuffed things in their bag.
And then someone smashed our garage door opener to steal the battery.
Anyway, I know that crime is low here. I know the numbers. But I could understabd why the average person would see what I saw and ignore that it was the pandemic and everyone went crazy for three years and think that everything is terrible.
I could identify empirical trends of disorder using Google Street View data (2011-present) if someone gave a budget of e.g. $1000. Unfortunately, I don't have the capacity otherwise - would be interesting though!
Most shoplifting is noticed only by a few retail employees. When people complain about disorder as shoplifting, I expect they are complaining about 1: stores they visit locking items behind glass, 2: viral videos of brazen shoplifting where the thief makes no attempt to conceal that they are stealing. 1 could be a policy innovation rather than reflective of underlying rates but it makes people *feel* like theft is going up (they weren't locking things up last year, so it must have gotten worse). 2, we're never gonna get anything like hard data on this, but we've had the capacity to make viral videos for significantly longer than we have had viral videos of brazen shoplifting, it would be weird if it's been going on at the same rate for ages and we only recently started pointing cell phone cameras at it. 2 seems especially corrosive to the social order because everyone gets to see a thief acting as though there are no rules, which plants resentment in the minds of rule-followers, and larcenous ideas in the minds of less upstanding citizens.
Isn't there also an international comparison aspect to this? A lot more people have gone to East Asia, seen the clean and safe cities there, and realized that ours are really quite disorderly and dirty in comparison. Even if American cities are not worse in a trendline sense, they're a lot worse compared to the cities you now know about and have been to.
An alternative hypothesis for a rise in the disorder vibes: overall public space activity is down as people spend more time at home and on electronics. If physical crime/disorder stays roughly constant, but people spend much less time outdoors, then the disorder makes up a large fraction of the lived public experience.
So I grew up in a large Canadian city (so you can probably assume less crime/less disorder than an American city). My whole life I have always felt like the media covers crime/disorder disproportionate to my own lived experience. (I should note I am a large man which may be relevant to my lived experience.) But that's probably a more extreme thing in Canada, where our largest cities are notably safer than smaller cities but it's covered as if the biggest cites are the most dangerous. (Canadians think Toronto and Vancouver are the most dangerous but the most dangerous cities are all in the Prairies.)
A brief aside: Many years ago, I moved to a smaller city within the greater urban area where I grew up. I lived there for 5 years. While I lived there, everyone I worked with was scared of my home city despite the city we lived in having a much higher murder rate than my home (much larger) city.
Anyway, I wonder how much of this is perception, how much of this is related to the "lack of experience of the urban environment" for so many people. (What is the percentage of people who live in suburb-like conditions of single-family homes on low-traffic streets vs. "way downtown" where they will regularly encounter "disorder"?)
Here, people who live in the suburbs are sometimes terrified of taking the subway. This always surprises me no matter how many times I've heard it. I can assure you it's never been as dangerous here to take the subway as it has been, at times, to do so in some American cities. (I have taken the subway here my whole life.)
Here, we see homeless people all the time. (We have fewer encampments than we did a few years ago, though.) Back when we still lived close to downtown, we saw graffiti all the time. We don't hear the loud noise because there's so much of it that we tune it out (though less now that we live farther from downtown.) I don't commute currently but back when I commuted I got a daily dose of all of this. I am very used to it and it doesn't make me feel uncomfortable at all (whether or not it's bad).
In 2023, we went to Portland and San Francisco (I had been to neither, my partner had once been to SF many years ago). People here told us we were crazy as the media was covering these places as if they were really, truly dangerous. We never felt in danger. Portland was mostly fine, San Francisco was definitely far worse than here in terms of (visible) homelessness and litter (but American cities are almost always dirtier than Canadian cities). In Eureka we were told not to walk to the bar from our hotel but we did anyway. We saw "disorder" but it wasn't anything different than what we've seen in plenty of other cities in other countries when we've traveled.
But we live in a city, and have lived in cities for decades, including right downtown, and we travel to cities, some of which are considered significantly less safe than where we live. So, for us, this "disorder" is just different degrees of "city." Some are cleaner than others. Some have more homeless than others. (The worst I've noticed in the US in the last few years was Denver, actually.) Some of way more graffiti than others (and some have plenty of intentional graffiti that is just public art). Some are way noisier than others.
But if you spend all or most of your time in somewhat less urban areas without this stuff (or with way less), doesn't any of it feel alien? And I can't help but feel that the TV media does it's utter best to try to enhance this feeling every single broadcast by screaming about crime in cities.
I mentioned on the other thread that I had a credit card stolen and promptly used for fraud. That's a crime, and I did report it, on an online site provided by the county. AFAIK, nothing ever came of it. I took the effort of calling my credit card company, getting the card cancelled, and the payments reversed, which means the expense was probably shared between me, the company, and the various defrauded merchants. Some of this might ultimately wind up on the records of an insurance company, and might not be reported as crime.
There might be significant amounts of such fraud recorded by businesses, that doesn't show up as crime. I think it certainly counts for many people as disorder.
California famously passed Proposition 47 in 2014, which set a $950 limit on shoplifting being counted as a misdemeanor vs. a felony. This was widely reported as "legalizing shoplifting", often punctuated by phone videos of people literally breaking into retail store cases and making off with armloads of consumer goods. While it was clear that theft was happening, it was never clear whether this was before or after Prop47, whether the thieves were doing this specifically because they believed they'd get away with it now and would not have before, or even whether the thieves were caught. The presumption was that they all escaped and were likely to do it again later.
The apparent official intent of Prop47 was to prioritize prison time for crimes more serious than shoplifting. Taking this at face value, it still implies that prison space is scarce, which in turn suggests that crime is on the rise. It's also reasonable to assume that if shoplifting up to $950 carries a lighter penalty than before, then such shoplifters are less likely to be reported by people who believe they'll just go free, so people who witness it just let it go, but still register it as disorder. (See avalancheGenesis's comment elsewhere here.)
I recall reports of merchants shutting down businesses because they would not be able to afford the losses, but no concrete examples. (I might have known of some if I were a resident of California, but I'm not.) Shutting down a business isn't a crime, but if it happens because of potential crime, I think it does count as disorder. The same applies if businesses stay open but have to put more goods behind glass walls, bars on their windows, and so on.
The social media effect means I know about thefts in California that probably would not reach me in prior decades. I live on the east coast, and even petty stuff on the west coast is discoverable from my pocket. A perceived rise in crime might be in part due to being made aware of more of the crime that was always happening.
TLDR: disorder is also attributable to social media effects, reclassification of crime as not-crime or lesser-crime, and knock-on effects from lower penalties for real crime. Also, real crime may have shifted from obviously violent forms to less violent, but in greater volume; specifically, financial fraud. High quality fraud data, if available, should shed more light on whether this is the case. (Matt Runchey's comments appear to provide some leads.)
If the 1930s - 1960s were the recent lowest point in crime/disorder, but compared to the period 1960-1990/into the 2000s, our present period is doing much better, then this is going to get societally weighted by who the most prominent crime/disorder complainers are.
If 80% of complaints of higher crime and disorder are dominated by boomers, then they were either a child at the end of that golden age, or remember it going away, and have simply not done recent updates. The other side of it is that if you know about racial and geographical origin crime statistics in America and Europe, you would intuitively expect crime to have gone up (certainly gang related grenade attacks have risen in Sweden, but perhaps overall crime has gone down; I haven't checked recently), if you don't do some further discount for ageing society, better enforcement, bowling alone social dynamics reducing opportunities for crime etc etc. Then there's social media so that everyone knows what the most recent severe criminal incident is.
80% of crimes are committed by people with three or more arrests. Is this related to disorder? Yes, absolutely. We aren't doing a good job of putting the bad people away.
And most interactions with bad people aren't crimes. They're proto-crimes.
Even the axewielding maniac running around a Target didn't actually hurt anyone, after all. Disorder? Yes. Criminal? Yes. But not showing up in aggravated assault, as he didn't Hurt Anyone. Physically at least.
Re: shoplifting, some thoughts from the Spiders Georg of shoplifting anecdata that is New York City.
Shoplifting in NYC is widely reported by most of its residents as having become "much worse" over the last decade. These reports are subjective, but are backed by steadily increasing security costs and retail location abandonment. However, none of this necessarily means that there's any *more* shoplifting than their was before!
Rather:
- Shoplifting in NYC has become more organized and systematic, such that successful shoplifting attempts tend to grab higher-value items with higher commensurate impacts on the store's bottom line. (The hypothesis for this systematization being that light punishment for shoplifting in NYC has led to gangs increasingly treating shoplifting as a low-risk revenue center.)
- Large chain stores in NYC are in a Red Queen race against shoplifters. Large chain stores must keep increasing YoY security spending (through measures like entire aisles locked behind plastic shields) in order to keep the total amount of shoplifting constant. Presumably, if they stopped increasing YoY investments into security, shoplifting would spike.
- The security costs of doing business often drive the higher-crime locations revenue-negative; these large chain stores choose to close these locations. Often, nothing replaces these locations (as other big chains see that their rival moved out and deduce that the location would be revenue-negative for them as well), leading to "urban blight" of the streets these locations were on (i.e. less legitimate traffic to businesses on the street = fewer "eyes" on the street = shoplifters can operate more openly.)
- Meanwhile, small family-owned bodegas in NYC cannot afford the costs of increased security required to deal with increasingly-sophisticated shoplifters. Most of these close as well. These storefronts may reopen, but now hosting either service businesses (hair salons, medical clinics, dentist's offices, massage therapists, payday loans) or retail businesses with pre-depreciated stock (e.g. restaurants/cafes, pawn shops.) (In other words, the offerings available on the street begin to resemble those of a blighted commercial street.)
The disorder hypothesis always struck me as a desperation move by people who were embarrassed that actual crime statistics didn’t support their narrative. It simply became fashionable to believe that liberal cities with their PC policies allowed rot to settle into cities. Fox News played this theme on an endless loop in the early 2020s in an effort to discredit woke politicians and Biden
I really hate the tendency to try to construct "disorder" as some sort of natural category. A lot of people apparently have that impulse, but it strikes me as either inexcusably vague or deliberately dishonest (depending on the context). Just consider the kind of things being lumped together in this post:
1. Shoplifting. Shoplifting is theft, and theft is one of the most central examples of crime there is. Everyone understands why its bad.[1
2. Littering. On the one hand, littering does have a cumulative, negative impact on the hygenics and aesthetics of public space, and it's reasonable to want to control. On the other hand, it would get my nomination of the type of crime most likely to be perpetrated by "normies" (possibly alongside traffic crime).
3. Graffiti. In many cases, graffiti is an entirely victimless crime. A graffiti artist who jazzes up a publicly-owned wall that was previously bare concrete is doing, at worst, a really tiny amount of harm and at best a public service. Now people having their private property graffitied absolutely do have a valid complaint, but that would fall more under the "crime victimization" header than the "public disorder" header. People complaining about graffiti mostly seem to be complaining *that it exists*, regardless of who owns the surface its own. That right there is an aesthetic preference and nothing more.
4. Homelessness. And way down at the other end of the spectrum from shoplifting, we have the part where people's main complaint is poor people *existing in public.* Of course, basically everybody, regardless of their politics, would like the overall homelessness rate to go down. But as a "public disorder" complaint, it is a complaint not that housing is too expensive or the social safety net too weak. It's a complaint that some people really don't like having to look at The Poors under any circumstances.[1]
When you have a category that lumps together actual theft on one end, with The Wrong People Existing Where I Can See Them on the other end, it might be worth considering if it's just a bad category. By which I mean it obscures more than it reveals. A lot of the preferences that go into disliking "public disorder" are fundamentally aesthetic preferences. People are going to differ quite a lot on their aesthetic preferences, far more so than they differ on questions like "do you think it's OK for people to steal from you?" Trying to make laws enforcing people's aesthetic preferences on the public at large seems bound to cause no end of trouble, and do very little good.
[1] Of course, sometimes homeless people commit crimes like assault or theft. But that, again, is a crime victimization question, not a public disorder question.
One bit of data, one anecdote, one thing in the middle, and a hypothesis:
The frequency of graffiti on railroad cars is well-documented in railfan photos, and has been increasing substantially in the last 20-30 years. These days, it is rare to see a freight car without spray-paint graffiti. In the 1980s, it was the opposite. I'm not entirely sure when the switchover happened, but I would expect sometime between the mid-1990s and 2010ish.
A friend of mine grew up in Berkeley in the 1990s. They describe people using heroin on the street on Telegraph Ave. being a common thing then, and witnessed said users being verbally belligerent to a police officer who asked (not demanded!) that they move down to the public park to do their drugs. This was what was normal for that time and place.
Many of my family grew up in Myrtle Beach, SC. In the 1980s, there were numerous dance establishments that would commonly serve alcohol to underaged customers, and drug use and date rape (especially statutory rape) were normalized. I don't think I have a cousin from that era that didn't have a drug problem at one point or another, and they grew up in a definitely well-to-do family. Similarly, histories of Mountain View talk about an establishment that had regular wet-t-shirt contests with questionably-aged participants who would sometimes show up dead of drug overdoses afterwards. In the writeups I've seen of these that have quotes from people who were there firsthand, the people that were there often talk of them positively and fondly, even when they are directly talking about the "crime" and "disorder" parts.
I would note that everyone who is talking about personal perceptions of societal change over a timespan of decades is comparing a perception from when they were much younger than they are now, and in many cases are also comparing a world that they grew up in (and developed the survival instincts for) to one that has changed. My friend never felt uncomfortable on Telegraph Ave., or being technically homeless and couch-surfing with a series of lovers during a stretch of their college days. Whereas I would be totally skeeved out by that, and in my teenage years happily gave scritches to half-ton farm animals and habitually stepped on top of logs rather than over them in the forest without constant worry. People have complained about "kids these days" for millennia. It seems likely to me that, by normalizing the statistics and anecdotes to a consistent viewpoint (i.e, effectively something like "would a 35-year-old in 1990 have thought society was worse or better than a 35-year-old today?"), we are erasing a large part of the reason for the perceptions.
I'm surprised you didn't consider a very simple story for people experiencing a rise in "shoplifting disorder" despite a decline in shoplifting, which is that the risk of shoplifting causes shops to take countermeasures, which are effective, but which customers notice and dislike.
In my youth, I could go to a CVS, find the deodorant aisle, retrieve a stick of deodorant from the shelf, and pay for it at the register. Now the deodorant is hidden behind plexiglass, which I have to flag down an employee to open. This probably decreases shoplifting, but it is a clear degradation in my shopping experience.
Another example: I have never had a bike stolen from me. But this is because I know bike thieves are common, and take countermeasures to protect myself. Namely, I never lock my bike outside overnight, I strip it of accessories like strap-on lights when I leave it, etc... If I ever do leave it unlocked, for instance, leaning against the door of a small cafe in which I am fetching a cup of coffee, I watch it like a hawk, ready to charge out of the cafe should someone try to steal it. And, indeed, I have had to chase people down who tried just that. So in the statistics, I have 'never experienced theft,' but this is only because I modify my behavior to avoid experiencing theft, in a way which makes my bike significantly less useful to me.
I don't necessarily buy that crime is dramatically increasing, by the way. But I'm surprised you didn't consider the above explanation.
1. Urbanization. When two people punch each other in the middle of a farm, two people know about it. When two people fight in downtown there are dozens of witnesses. When it happens on a subway train there are dozens of witnesses who themselves are made to feel unsafe because they can't easily walk away. And they have to be in that environment every day.
2. Media coverage. Images and video are much more emotionally visceral. Getting images or video used to be rare and expensive, limited to only the most important events. Now just about every minor event has video coverage from multiple angles. Real-time coverage means that you can have a lot more "brain space" devoted to an issue. Consider how the eg. ICE protests/shootings in Minneapolis would have been covered in newspapers in the 1980s vs. today. In the 80s you would have a few column-inches and maybe a photo every day. Now you have video from multiple angles, the commentators who provide the video analysis, the commentators who provide the legal analysis. You can spend more time watching video about these events than the events actually took and I'm not sure that's psychologically healthy. But it gets eyeballs/clicks (and revenue). Even trivial things like the drug zombies leaning around in Philadelphia are available on-tap any time you want to be outraged.
3. Political advantage. Having a problem people care about makes it easier to get money, power, and votes. More funding for police, prisons, social services, and welfare. More gun rights. More gun control. Drug legalization. Drug prohibition. So politicians are incentivized to raise these issues into the public discourse even among people who otherwise wouldn't care. And also the failures of the policies of their opponents.
I'd guess its similar to the journalists theorem from the previous vibe session post. The people who are in the scrappy neighborhoods of major urban areas are more likely to be in the discussion, and their experience has been bad.
Also general urbanization fits into this. As someone who grew up in a more rural area, any amount of disorder seems shocking to me when I go into a major urban area. You can point to numbers for graffiti and boomboxes and homeless but for anyone who came from a more rural region those things just aren't visible at all, so every experience with a typical city is awash with disorder. There has definitely been an uptick in urbanization in the last 50 years, and each person gets their own moment of shock when travelling in the city for the first time.
Parents have used increased wages to pick locations where they can shelter their kids from all forms of disorder, where teenagers loitering is the most serious crime anyone will see. And those kids all grow up with an expectation of the world being orderly until later in life. It could be even after college with how many colleges are built as a bubble.
Here in Seattle, drug stores and grocery stores have adopted various anti-shoplifting measures: locking certain items, sequestering certain items in a "store within a store", installing turnstiles, and hiring security guards to "check receipts". Presumably they paid for these measures only because they had reason to believe that shoplifting was up. If shoplifting isn't up now, how much of that stability is due to these measures reducing shoplifting? If we went back to the way it was several years ago without these measures, how much would shoplifting increase? How much do these measures cost? As a customer, I find these measures to be a reminder that shoplifting is a problem today that it wasn't several years ago.
I remember being asked for receipts when exiting stores in the 90s, including at major chains like Costco and Home Depot. Got any data on what has changed?
Even a lower crime rate implies there being more crimes being committed over time. The idea of crime being a "rate" that can be accepted leads to the kind of low-trust society, where everyone needs to carry a keychain, or their car, bike gets stolen or home broken in. Long term exposure to such an environment is a hazard to mental health and social cohesion. Cortisol and such. The effect of that exposure is cumulative, even if crime rates may be lower than they once were.
Are boom box guys really still a thing? The idea sounds so like, 80s and 90s New York to me lol. Maybe they're just not a thing in my area and I'd never encountered them on my one trip to NYC or the times I've been to SF.
I wonder how much is the sense that the world is spinning out of control because conservatives in general and Trump in particular have not disappeared, as seemed inevitable in 1992 and 2008. I am suggesting some societal analogy to referred pain. I haven't the faintest idea how to measure that. The only vague evidence I have for it is that conservatives have always been upset by disorder and are oversensitive to it. Now it is liberals as well.
I fundamentally disagree with the entire framing of this post and most of the comments I’ve seen. The implicit assumption seems to be “people thinking crime is bad and getting worse is a worsening phenomenon”, but I don’t think it is! My lived experience is the opposite of what Scott and most of the comments describe.
Crime was a constant topic in 80s and 90s TV, and in political campaigns of the time. Republican politicians used to run on “tough on crime” as a primary platform. Now they run on immigration, with crime as a secondary justification rather than the primary campaign promise. This shift is exactly what I’d expect to see when crime rates become lower.
Gallop has been tracking this.
In 1994 52% of people saw crime as the top problem (42% when you average all the polls from that year) now it is only around 3%. What more do you want? 0% of people saying crime is their top issue?
So then why am I the only one commenting this? Simple: people’s baselines assumption for how people should respond to good times are off.
What if during times when things are getting better 80% of Americans will always view things as declining (but not as their top issue) and during times of major decline that number jumps to 90%+ (and lots of people saying it is their top issue). I think there is a sort of default negativity bias among Americans (all humans maybe idk). Maybe in an absolute utopia we get all the way down to 70% of people thinking things are going to shit and then we will known we’ve made it. If people didn’t feel this way the world wouldn’t have improved so drastically over the last couple hundred years.
This gallop pol almost exactly confirms my hypothesis (about crime at least):
This is completely different than the Vibecession. Scott spent a huge chunk of that post justifying the assertion that vibes were indeed bad, but no time justifying that in this post. The Vibecession is very well documented and I personally noticed it even before the term existed. This feels very different than the vibecession to me.
(Note: I am Gen Z I just enjoy watching old TV shows, so maybe I’m wrong about the subjective changes)
Where I am, a mainly middle class/working class distant suburban area of New York, maybe closer to the exurbs, locking up merchandise seems mainly a practice of CVS and Walgreens. Supermarkets rarely lock things up except for the most obvious items such as powdered baby formula* and sometimes razor blades. Target is much the same, I rarely go to Walmart so I don’t know about them.
* = theft of baby formula is not the doing of poor mothers desperate to feed their infants, but of drug dealers who use it as an extender for narcotics.
I had no idea of the meaning of “secular” as used in this article. Even when I looked it up, I didn’t read the list far down enough to reach any of the meanings that not “non-religious”. Took me a second trip to the dictionary to finally see it.
Consider effects measures. How many home depots have had to lock up all cordless power tools behind cages before/after say 2023? (The one closest to me resorted to this sometime in the last few years.) Such locking up is costly (cages, plexiglass, locks) and likely reduces sales because of customer frustration.
By the way, blue on blue text is hard to read, is there some reason the web page background can't be white?
Does the shoplifting rate remaining constant mean anything when enforcement measures are 100x as Draconian? If in society A you can enter a store and leave unbothered at any point and in society B products are locked behind glass, you need to scan your receipt to leave the checkout areas which constantly record you with face recognition systems, pass a one way gate and a security guard, and despite all that the shoplifting rate is the same, which has a bigger crime problem?
I do not see that anyone has mentioned the rise of mass shootings. While not contributing materially to the murder rate, they have had a profound impact on the perception of personal safety anywhere that people gather: schools - which have been reorganized around prevention -churches, synagogues, concerts and any sort of public festival. I know people who think of the risk pretty much any time they attend an event. This was not a thing 20 years ago, and surely represents an important decline in quality of life.
If mass shootings are driving the perception of crime rise, then the most straightforward solution is to stop reporting and overreporting them. Mass shootings are a tiny fraction of all crime, massively overrepresented and even miscounted in reporting (for reasons both natural and motivated), and drive copycats.
<If mass shootings are driving the perception of crime rise, then the most straightforward solution is to stop reporting and overreporting them.
Agreed, but it ain't gonna happen. Mass shooting reports get eyeballs for the media. I wonder whether anyone has calculated how much each earns in increased revenue for the media? The dead are a truckload of solid gold statues for them. Charlie Kirk was a solid gold Statue of Liberty.
The risk is tiny. You're more likely to win the lottery than you are to get killed in a mass shooting. I understand people being spooked, though. But I personally never give it a thought in theaters and similar settings.
Of course, it's not a rational fear. But tell that to the school system, which has lockdown drills on a routine basis, and will shut down a school and send everyone home for the day if some kid posts a photo of a mushroom cloud on instagram.
this clicks. the data says crime is down but people's lived experience says otherwise – and "disorder" explains the gap better than reporting bias
the shoplifting analysis is particularly good. FBI stats flat, retail surveys flat, but everyone feels like it's exploding. maybe the shift isn't volume but visibility? a few high-profile viral videos of brazen theft do more for perception than 1000 unreported incidents
the 1930s-1960s "local minimum" theory is underrated. we're not comparing to history, we're comparing to our parents' sanitized postwar bubble. of course everything feels worse
one addition: homelessness might be flat nationally but hyper-concentrated in ~10 cities. SF/LA/Seattle absorb the visibility tax
My theory is that the frustration comes not from the absolute amount of disorder, but the ratio of its amount to its perceived preventability. In 1935, we didn't get too indignant about people dying from simple bacterial infections. But if the same infection killed someone in 1955, you bet that we'd be angry! Antibiotics were cheap by then. My point is that the same bad outcome seems far worse when we know that we have the capacity to prevent it. As a society we are undeniably richer than we were back in the 60s, and as New Yorkers and San Franciscans, well, you can't even compare. So it's reasonable to expect that with our new riches we'd find remedies for the awful things that ail us. If you say "actually Polio is no worse now than it was in the 50's, so why are you being such a whiny baby?" I'd say it's because we now have a Polio vaccine, so it has no business ever getting close to as bad as it was then. And maybe it's the same with crime. People are bothered by shoplifting, but they're extra bothered when they see cops leaning and shrugging as shoplifers fill their loot bags in the store that the cops were supposed to protect. The preceived preventability of crime is a big part of what bothers us, and I think it's preventability feels like it's increasing even if its magnitude is constant. That's bothersome.
Your problem is not proving whether US crime has dropped a bit in the last few years. Its why even with that drop, US has crime rates 2-3x higher than other developed countries. Answer that, statistics boy.
Well, it doesn’t really seem to hold up once it’s looked into. Homicide definitely; more like 3 to 5 times higher. The fact that the United States is a gun culture has something to do with that. In other sorts of violent crimes, such as assault and rape there is a lot of divergence in what is defined by those charges from country to country and makes comparison rather difficult. In short, very arguable. The UK actually seems to have higher assault statistics than the United States, which has something to do with football hooliganism and pub culture apparently. Rape and sexual assault have the highest statistics in Nordic countries, but that seems to be very much a definitional issue: what they call rape in Sweden and what they call rape in America.
Here's a meta-question on your topic. I'm convinced by the argument that crime and disorder are not getting worse despite what many people believe. Nor do I credit the widespread fear that civilization is on the brink of collapse. My meta question is: "Are the fears -- if not the facts -- getting worse?" Do we always whine, complain, and worry about the state of society, regardless? Or does the fear itself wax and wane, and can we measure that?
You complain quite a bit about boomboxes in public spaces. Care to explain a bit more why? In my view this comes off like a personal preference -- likely that public spaces should be orderly rather than chaotic; for individuals to go about their business peacefully rather than have their senses deluged with music etc. But I've never read an attempt to substantiate this view. It doesn't appear obviously correct to me.
I'll make an attempt here to articulate the opposite position, which I hold I've also never seen anyone articulate. Public spaces are public, which means they are for _everyone_, including people who enjoy playing loud music. It is not generally right for the government to impose a particular way of existing on people in a public space. Rather, norms are formed by the people who populate a space. This means that loud music is completely acceptable in some locations (e.g. Dolores Park on a weekend) but also less acceptable in other locations (Alta Plaza in SF, which is full of families). There is nothing wrong with playing loud music in public; it is all contextual; and if it's happening a lot in crowded spaces when you're around, but you find it detestable, you're likely in the minority, since other people at least seem willing to tolerate it. (This argument falls down on the subway, where you have no choice but to stay there).
You can also categorize music in public as disorderly, but in a pro-social way; like the way that a bar or party is disorderly, or even a public market. Not everything that is disorderly is anti-social! And just because you personally find something disorderly and personally objectionable doesn't mean it's a net negative.
Public spaces are for everyone, including people who like setting off flashbang grenades and stink bombs. Fortunately, a space being "for" someone, does not imply that it is for them to do absolutely anything they like there.
I'm not sure he thinks of it as more than a personal preference -- that's why he feels OK about saying he recommend the death penalty for it. If he really thought it was a crime that should be punished he'd be much more circumspect about is personal preferences. I don't much like boom boxes in a public space, because they are never playing the music I'd like as the sound track to my day, and they force me to listen to somebody else's sound track, but I don't loathe them the way Scott does. What I really loathe is TV's mounted on the wall in waiting rooms, spraying out TV turd. I dislike TV so much I don't even own one, nor any substitute. I just watch a movie now and then on my computer. I hate the sound of the trained voices of newcasters and such, the trained fake emotional spectrum of sombre, serious, funny-stuff, etc, and TV ads make me want to beat my head against the wall. And I hate the idea that an ever-yapping TV is sort of like running water, something everybody counts on and needs.
A thought I just had about why people might perceive crime being up, but not an increase in people being victims: by far the most common illegal behavior I personally encounter is people driving cars unsafely. It actively makes my life worse when I'm walking through a crosswalk and the walk signal is on but I have to take evasive maneuvers to avoid getting run over by someone majorly running a red light! And more so worse that I have to always be on guard for those people, whether or not they're around! But I'm not exactly the victim of a crime per se because someone drove unsafely/illegally in my vicinity.
I haven't yet looked to actual data to confirm or reject this, but the vibes I'm feeling is that this sort of behavior is up since covid and hasn't gone down, because people as a whole are acting more selfishly and with less consideration about the impact they have on the people around them. And this could be the case without invalidating any of your arguments that generally focus on either crimes with a victim (like murder or shoplifting) or on crimes that leave behind concrete evidence (like littering and graffiti).
I think we should be careful extrapolating percent or per capita data when assessing the 'vibes' impact of policies like homelessness and litter. If NYC goes from a population of 7M in the 1980's to 9M 45 years later, two things can be true:
1. Percent of people littering/homeless can go down
2. Absolute amount of littering/homelessness can go up
In the same time, the overall US population has risen significantly. Now, some of that population is likely to have moved onto new roads or into new neighborhoods, but not all. To the extent cities become more densely populated over time, we may see increased absolute amounts of certain types of disorder/crime even as rates of disorder/crime go down.
In the end, it's your proximity to disorder/crime that matters most. This is the explanation for 'white flight' into the suburbs. It doesn't matter to the Smiths that, actually, fewer of their neighbors got shot per capita last year. If they keep hearing gunshots, they're going to complain about the violence. The same with litter. Sure, the rate of litter might go down, but if the streets are more clogged with Burger King wrappers, who's keeping track of the official per capita littering rate?
You should also take into consideration the "constancy of the worry coefficient." No matter how high or low the actual levels of crime, any given individual or group will tend to worry about the same amount. It's how much mental concern and anguish are applied to the problem irrespective of actual crime.
The thing that made me realize all of these issues are almost certainly just vibes is that people complain about the price of Youtube Premium.
At your fingertips, you have an infinite amount of entertainment. Thousands of people dedicate their lives to making funny, engaging, beautiful, and informative things for you to watch. The greatest professors in the world give their lectures, the greatest musicians on earth perform, the funniest comedians have their own Youtube show, and news organizations equip and pay entire crews to attend newsworthy events, just so you can watch it.
All of this is FREE. If you want to get rid of the ads, you can pay 15$ a month to even watch ad free. And people complain about it. Imagine showing Youtube to Rene Descartes or Albert Einstein, and while they're in awe with the incredible beauty of modern music or the incredible depth of knowledge available to them, you tell them "it's way too expensive though, this costs me like 70% of 1 hour of wage every month".
I'm fairly convinced that peoples perception of things like crime or the economy are almost completely disconnected from the real world.
+1 this... no matter HOW GOOD things get, people will find ways to bitch about it. Lowest infant mortality, lowest global poverty rate, lowest $ANY_BAD_THING...? But there are SOME PEOPLE WHO ARE EVEN RICHER! I can kinda sorta see the complaint, but it mostly strikes me as sour grapes
That’s been decreasing the past few years! But it has been a big jump over a decade or two earlier. (I suspect it’s also less than it was in the 1980s.)
"The 1930s - 1960s were a local minimum in crime and disorder of all types."
I would argue that the FDR-Truman-Ike-JFK era was particularly well-led.
Most of all I would point to FDR as a great national leader, although he seems out of fashion in recent years.
How accurate are the statistics actually? The 1930s seems like it was actually a fairly violent era by modern standards, the main difference being that the violence was between acquaintances - organized crime, bar fights, neighbor-on-neighbor, domestic abuse - rather than stranger on stranger. I’m not sure things were actually better managed nationally at all. Communities had more leeway to do internal policing and people generally lived in tighter quarters and knew each other. A lot of violent crime simply wasn’t reported because in most communities you wouldn’t involve the cops involved in an altercation between familiars. Plus the lynchings of course.
A body with a hole in it or a hole with a body in it demands bureaucratic attention.
The stats suggest that America got a lot less murderous over the course of the 1930s, although the great murder movies like "The Maltese Falcon" and "Double Indemnity" based on 1930s novels weren't filmed until the early 1940s.
The end of Prohibition is often given credit for that drop in the 30s.
And if you go by those novels, police in the big Californian cities were absolutely rotten with corruption, plus casual racism might mean under-reporting of murders, e.g. "Farewell My Lovely" where Nulty, the detective assigned to the murders by Moose Malloy of the black manager of the former night club complains bitterly that this is nothing, he has no chance of publicity from it (and so building his career), and Chandler hints this is in part because Nulty is honest so has no pull in the department:
"A man named Nulty got the case, a lean-jawed sourpuss with long yellow hands which he kept folded over his kneecaps most of the time he talked to me. He was a detective-lieutenant attached to the 77th Street Division and we talked in a bare room with two small desks against opposite walls and room to move between them, if two people didn't try it at once. Dirty brown linoleum covered the floor and the smell of old cigar butts hung in the air. Nulty's shirt was frayed and his coat sleeves had been turned in at the cuffs. He looked poor enough to be honest, but he didn't look like a man who could deal with Moose Malloy.
He lit half of a cigar and threw the match on the floor, where a lot of company was waiting for it. His voice said bitterly:
"Shines. Another shine killing. That's what I rate after eighteen years in this man's police department. No pix, no space, not even four lines in the want-ad section."
I didn't say anything. He picked my card up and read it again and threw it down.
...Nulty spit in the wastebasket again. "I'll get him," he said, "about the time I get my third set of teeth. How many guys is put on it? One. Listen, you know why? No space. One time there was five smokes carved Harlem sunsets on each other down on East Eighty-four. One of them was cold already. There was blood on the furniture, blood on the walls, blood even on the ceiling. I go down and outside the house a guy that works on the Chronicle, a newshawk, is coming off the porch and getting into his car. He makes a face at us and says, 'Aw, hell, shines,' and gets in his heap and goes away. Don't even go in the house."
I'm shocked, shocked to find that police departments could harbor corruption!
A number of police departments got a lot more professional and less corrupt after WWII. Veterans who had seen combat came home with a chip on their shoulders against the cops who'd managed to sit out the war and stay home, collecting bribes. Tolkien's "Scouring of the Shire" about war veterans hobbits cleaning up the shire after WWI was re-enacted by American vets in places like Santa Monica, CA.
The LAPD hired a Marine general, William Parker, to clean up the LAPD from the top down. Parker created the famous serious, professional, honest, unfriendly LAPD of the postwar era that wound up having novel problems of its own.
Here are deaths by homicide in for all races in Cook County, IL (Chicago plus inner suburbs).
1999 776 5,365,344 14.5
2000 773 5,376,741 14.4
2001 825 5,360,562 15.4
2002 758 5,328,775 14.2
2003 774 5,294,739 14.6
2004 618 5,252,021 11.8
2005 608 5,207,615 11.7
2006 627 5,165,495 12.1
2007 572 5,154,235 11.1
2008 626 5,161,831 12.1
2009 598 5,181,728 11.5
2010 557 5,194,675 10.7
2011 544 5,217,080 10.4
2012 595 5,231,351 11.4
2013 537 5,240,700 10.2
2014 550 5,246,456 10.5
2015 605 5,238,216 11.5
2016 896 5,203,499 17.2
2017 806 5,211,263 15.5
2018 682 5,180,493 13.2
2019 645 5,150,233 12.5
2020 957 5,108,284 18.7
2018 682 5,180,493 13.2
(12.2 - 14.2)
2019 645 5,150,233 12.5
(11.6 - 13.5)
2020 957 5,108,284 18.7
(17.5 - 19.9)
2021 1,061 5,173,146 20.5
(19.3 - 21.7)
2022 929 5,109,292 18.2
(17.0 - 19.4)
2023 805 5,087,072 15.8
(14.7 - 16.9)
2024 719 5,182,617 13.9
(12.9 - 14.9)
The single most murderous year in recent Cook County history was 2021 due to the "Racial Reckoning."
https://wonder.cdc.gov/controller/datarequest/D77;jsessionid=678C3D42D3679254A940E09262A7
You can clearly see the Ferguson Effect and the Floyd Effect.
Starting at 1999 - how clever! And how absolutely skewed.
That's when the CDC makes it convenient to start counting homicides by race/ethnicity: Hispanics aren't broken out before 1999.
Starting in the bureaucratically arbitrary randmo year of 1999 is actually more realistic than the usual journalistic process, which is starting at the peak of the Crack Wars in 1991 and then claiming murders are down, Down, DOWN!
You listed 2018-2020 twice
The CDC has data from 1968-1998 but without breaking out Hispanics.
Then it has data from 1999-2020 with minor methodological differences compared to 2018-2024, notably that Asian and Pacific Islander are lumped together. But that's not a big deal in Cook County homicide counts.
With exception of a giant world war where many young men were occupied.
Prohibition ended in 1933, I think that might be part of the decline during that period.
Local minimums for all kinds of things during Boomer childhoods of course.
Reporter Sam Quinones has written a couple of books about crime and drugs. He points out that law enforcement in Southern California got much more adept at fighting criminal gangs in the early 21st Century by using RICO to round up entire gangs, not just their kingpins, at once and sending them off to federal prisons far away from which they couldn't use their girlfriends as couriers.
But ... around 2015 fentanyl arrived, and, Quinones theorizes, a newer or revitalized form of meth, which inspired a huge wave of homelessness, wrecking downtown Los Angeles's chance to improve.
These drugs emerged about the same time as the anti-police Ferguson Effect.
Can you elaborate about the newer form of meth? I have not heard anything about that and I consider myself plugged into homeless and drug trends due to my medical job.
Quinones argues that between 2010-2015 as Mexico cracked down hard on the import of precursor chemicals for the ephedrine based meth production, the manufacturers switched to P2P meth (which is what Walter white switched to in breaking bad when they couldn't smurf sufficient pseudophed). He believes that p2p meth is uniquely psychosis inducing and shortens the time from addiction to crazed street person dramatically.
I found his book The Least of Us very insightful about both the meth and fentanyl epidemics.
This doesn't make any sense because meth psychosis is caused by severe sleep deprivation plus amphetamine induced mania.
If you soberly go days without sleeping, you will feel somewhat paranoid and irrational. The combine that with drug induced mania and it's a recipe for psychosis. But every user is being deprived of sleep at the same rate, whatever kind of amphetamine they are taking.
Conversely, if you have been getting plenty of sleep, you aren't going to have psychosis the first day you use, no matter what kind of amphetamine you're on. Because amphetamines are not hallucinogens. Of course, I'm speaking of generalities in this comment and there are exceptions that prove the rule.
Meth manufactured from p2p is chemically different: racemic rather than right-handed, and it tends to have different impurities than pseudoephedrine-derived meth. So it probably has somewhat different effects. Without knowing the details myself, it's totally plausible that it could be worse for mania, sleep deprivation, and addiction.
Your conclusions are perfectly logical, but the premises are off. Putting aside the issue of deliberate adulteration with fentanyl, chemical impurities are almost entirely irrelevant to the social problem of meth use. If all meth was 100 percent pure product from a high grade professional laboratory, this would change almost nothing "on the ground."
I agree the purity doesn't matter much--people will adjust their dose. I don't know a lot about the impurities involved, but different isomers can make a big difference--they'll give different ratios of effects and side effects, different rates of tolerance and dependence. I don't know whether or not it's a big factor in changing usage patterns, but for the same amount of getting high, you'll face a different profile of harms.
I'm open to arguments suggesting otherwise, but at face value I find it implausible that racemic ratios or impurities could have any effect on meth psychosis large enough to be observable on a population level.
Seems very plausible. Would you believe spearmint and caraway taste different at a population level?
I have gone days without sleeping, and paranoia and irrationality don't seem to be my symptoms. Can you cite some studies on this? I've had it from sleep researchers that symptoms can vary wildly...
I've been using amphetamines on and off for 20 years and I have spent a lot of time reading about amphetamines to understand my situation. Paranoia is on a spectrum and I would be surprised if you don't feel a bit “jumpy” or nervous after days of not sleeping. Or IOW, slightly paranoid. That would be extraordinary, but it is possible you are a uniquely confident and non-nervous person. But you don't have to take my word for it, I'll get back to you later with that data.
I'm reminded of dynomight's post "The main thing about P2P meth is that there's so much of it" (https://dynomight.net/p2p-meth/)
I don't know anything about drugs other than what I read. Here's my 2021 review of Quinones' book "The Least of Us:"
https://www.takimag.com/article/from-dreamland-to-nightmareland/
I'm pretty tuned in to the world of drug users and there's "no new or revitalized form of meth." I think the "wave of homelessness" was a combination of rising housing costs and a new systemic tolerance for visible homelessness.
I assumed they were talking about the "synthetic meth" which I read about in this article from 2021: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/the-new-meth/620174/
(disclaimer: I know nothing about this subject)
Methamphetamine is almost certainly not found in nature. So it is probably by definition synthetic. One lone scientific paper claims to have found methamphetamine in an obscure plant but the response from other researchers was incredulous. See your favorite AI chatbot for more details.
Scott, does shoplifting data for stores that close because there was so much shoplifting get counted in the shoplifting survey? Is there any data on anti-shoplifting measures in drug stores or similar? I think shoplifting escalated from "I need an employee to open a plastic case to buy a video game" to "I need an employee to open a plastic case to buy almost anything". I try to not go to stores anymore, but this would be a sharply felt impact for everyday people.
Good point
Retailers include shoplifting within a large category called “shrink.” This category also includes employee theft, inventory mismanagement and accounting errors. Shoplifting is likely *most* of shrink, but by no means all.
Shoplifting is also a convenient thing for a retailer to blame when it has to close an underperforming store.
Shoplifting is about a third of shrink.
I worked in shrink reduction for ten years (2006-2016). I can assure you that employee theft is by far the largest part of the shrink. Shoplifting is distant second, sometimes third.
Yep. If shoplifter behavior changes such that, without response, shoplifting would double but stores respond in a way that annoy customers and keeps the increase in shoplifting to sub 20% we'd see the evidence in question.
> I think shoplifting escalated from "I need an employee to open a plastic case to buy a video game" to "I need an employee to open a plastic case to buy almost anything".
Isn’t this describing shoplifting *prevention* escalation, rather than shoplifting escalation? Perhaps the one is a response to the other, but is there evidence for that? Are there other hypotheses, such as capitalist efficiency hunting becoming less and less tolerant of the same level of shrink? Has anyone asked stores why they have increased plastic case use or tried to measure it compared to shoplifting data?
To use an analogy, car accident prevention measures have escalated dramatically - new cars have lots of sensors and automatic braking etc - but that by itself is not evidence that car accidents have escalated, but rather that we tolerate it less as tech is improving. (Not saying these are comparable, more of an intuition pump to think about what evidence we should look for)
The most straightforward method I would employ to find out is to run a study where we ask retail business owners how much "shrink" they've experienced over the past ten years or so. Esp. larger retailers such as 7-Eleven, CVS, WalMart, Target, etc. They will doubtless have this recorded somewhere. It might even be possible to ask their insurers, but that's assuming this type of loss is widely insured and reported. (This information query might also be refused for security reasons.)
A retailer that suddenly invests more in theftproofing ought to be able to easily tell whether that was driven by a spate of theft or by some board member trying to pad his resume.
Yes, I think what happened a lot in those cases is stores realized (correctly) that after looking at *marginal changes* to purchase patterns of certain items that it made more sense than was previously thought to lock items under key. This has made the perception of shoplifting much greater because *fear of shoplifting* increased. (In reality the fear should have been higher back in 2003 but companies didn't realize that nearly as well as they do today with better loss prevention understanding.)
There has been a large increase in loss prevention in recent times which shows in a decrease in shoplifting but also a large increase in the *perception* of shoplifting.
Personally, while I've experienced some increase in barriers to buying things, these seem to be the result of safetyism rather than shoplifting prevention. The only literal plastic cases I've seen added to local stores was for laundry detergent around the time the "tide pod challenge" stories were going viral, and the only other new barriers I've noticed have been needing ID to buy certain OTC drugs.
It's very local. The only stuff under theft protection at my local rural Walmart are the knives and the video games.
Go to the Walmart in one of the worse parts of the city, it gets extended to razor blades and air mattresses.
On my last visit to San Francisco, I couldn't buy a toothbrush and some deodorant without getting an employee to unlock things.
Death penalty for graffiti artists too. Everybody hates them save for like four politicians.
Also this person: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/record-low-crime-rates-are-real-not/comment/216462857 . Maybe he's the one who elects those politicians. I admit it makes me angry because I can't come up with a rational argument against.
Yeah, let's widen the net and let God pardon those who weren't so bad after all.
I like graffiti, even the super banal ugly ones, though I'm still morally against it as the fact that I like them doesn't override the fact that they're by definition asserting your own wishes on public property or private property that isn't yours.
As for why I like them, I feel like it brings a lot of life into the city. They're like mini human stories that you catch while walking around, even the stupid ones like "<name>, I love you so much" or "<rival football club> are all stupid crayon eaters". The ones that are a bit insane, stupid, or funny(or all 3) and are left up for long enough eventually become local knowledge and even get quoted occasionally. And as that other commenter said when all you have to look at are the most boring gray concrete blocks the human touch of graffiti, even really stupid ones that say almost nothing, can make it more visually interesting.
I was also super fascinated with the graffiti remains in Pompeii(you should definitely read them if you haven't) .
Most of the graffiti in areas I'm familiar with doesn't contain coherent messages, at least not to anyone not involved in making it. This might vary by subculture; I've seen some places where this seemed not to be the case.
My feelings on the aesthetics of graffiti vary individually on a piece by piece basis, but my feelings overall tend towards strongly negative, because as the amount of graffiti in a place increases, the chance that some of it will be visually dissonant or uncohesive with the surroundings increases. Some graffiti might be visually well-composed and well-placed by skilled artists, but as more people contribute graffiti in an uncoordinated manner, it becomes almost certain that some of it will clash, both with the other graffiti and the surroundings, which spoils any positive visual effect the rest might have had as well.
I think it's also down to how much graffiti is normalised in your area. I'm from Eastern Europe and it's pretty common and is generally not a signifier of crime or decay. The cities in eastern europe are some of the safest in the world(when they're not an active warzone) so there's no harsh reaction to graffiti. Some people like them, some people dislike them and think they're ugly, but it's still ultimately about aesthetics and not about signalling potential danger and lawlessness.
And yes, it helps that most of it is somewhat? coherent. It's words on an aged facade that usually form complete sentences that sometimes make sense(but many of the famous ones that became local knowledge did so because they absolutely do not make sense so people argued over what the author wanted to say).
I agree. I think it's almost entirely about what it signals/implies (I'm also an EE and currently live in the UK) rather than any objective quality.
I'm from Eastern Europe too, and most graffiti near my place is just someone spraying their nickname or an abbreviation of something on the wall.
Graffiti (even "visually well-composed" examples) tend to be overwritten.
Which tends to just look like a mess.
Equally inane graffiti left on Egyptian ruins by Hellenistic tourists are now part of the archeological record themselves -- who knows whether the archeologists if the 4th millennium won't be thankful of the ones on our subway cars?
This is why I try to incorporate information that would be useful to future historians in my graffiti. "HEDONiC 2026 / CITY POP. 800k / PAPERCLIP COUNT APPROX. 10M (CHATGPT 5.2) / MUSK IS FLESH / GROK IS CODE / ALCOR ID 644021 PLZ REVIVE IF WORLD IS OK THANKS".
Now *this* is prosocial behavior.
The reason that it is hard to come up with a rational argument against is that there is a common conflation of graffiti with vandalism. But, the Mona Lisa painted on my car without my consent is vandalism, no matter its artistic merit. And, art in graffiti style painted on the side of a building with the owner's permission is, in general, more aesthetically pleasing than a blank wall. And, I would rather see one of these trains roll into a subway station than one that is graffiti-free (I am speaking of the exterior, not the interior) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bwzZPrNyjM
Rational argument:
The average person doesn't want graffiti, which means that wealthier neighborhoods that can afford policing and have fewer lawbreaking kids will have less of it, which means that graffiti becomes a sign of disorder, which means that being around graffiti will make people feel less safe, meaning that wealthier neighborhoods will invest even more into preventing graffiti and the disparity grows in a feedback loop.
Same sort of feedback loop applies to the boomboxes, though boomboxes are a more widely agreed-upon-to-be-aggravating irritant.
This might explain the opposite situation in eastern europe then. Everyone is kinda poor and the government is not going to bother removing graffiti unless it contains some sort of anti-socialist message. So the only clean places are the super high-end neighborhoods where all the party elites live. And if you're an average citizen you don't want to go there because the secret police will arrest you for suspicious behavior so if you see buildings that are unusually clean you should get out as soon as possible. The 2nd part doesn't really hold after the fall of socialism but most people never developed an association between graffiti and crime so they're not as bothered by it even if they think it's ugly.
Graffiti looks like a sign of weak property rights enforcement. Whether that reflects a genuine decline in how much people can get the state to back up their property rights, I can't say though. That's a potential other avenue of argument though.
You're going to hate me even more, I like modern architecture AND I like graffiti. No wonder why I seem so much happier in modern society than the rest of you.
Do you like it when someone paints graffiti on modern architecture?
Yes, I think it's part of the charm of a city. I also like clean minimal designs.
https://www.beyondmydoor.com/brutalist-architecture-belgrade-serbia/
If you set aside your prejudices for a moment, you can actually appreciate these kinds of things:)
So if you built yourself a Minecraft-looking dwelling, which is what passes for affordable modernism in America now, and somebody scrawled MAGA on it - you would just … leave it?
The rational argument against is to point out the difference between process and outcome. Just because he happens to like the graffiti mural that he walks by every day doesn't mean that general tolerance for graffiti is a net social positive. Just because the local gang murdered your sister's rapists after the DA failed to bring a case doesn't mean that gang violence should be condoned.
If he likes public art then fine: lobby the city council to commission some public art, or go into the local supermarket and convince them to let him paint their outside wall. The sane solution to drab cityscapes is definitely not "let anyone spray paint whatever they want wherever they want."
I apologise for bringing in politics, but I think this is a relevant component to your argument.
Your concept of "lobby the local government to commission some public art" places said government in a position which we need to seek permission from in order to have our environment in a way which we collectively want (if the populace generally doesn't want it, then we have other problems and the government still isn't terribly relevant). We can imagine scenarios - because they're hardly uncommon - where the populace would like public art, or enjoy having a graffiti culture, but the local council is being twerps on the topic because "something something tough on crime something". Similarly, we can imagine - because again, they're hardly uncommon - where the populace doesn't want graffiti, but the local government is unable/unwilling to do anything, placing the burden on private businesses or individuals to clean it off, only to have it reappear soon after.
Even if you can get these two to line up (plausible), then you've got issues on getting the kind of art the council approves of, rather than the populace. The local government in my area definitely has aesthetic tastes which are very opposed to mine and I would argue most people in the area. This is an absolute nightmare to resolve working through "the system", but comparatively easy to do if working directly.
My point is that your "lobby the local council" plan seems to involve a lot of unnecessary steps, cost, bureaucracy, uncertainty and delay, and it's not at all unreasonable for people to choose a different path, even if that path is also quite imperfect.
Yeah I'm not a huge fan of bureaucracy either but enforceable property rights is the way society had decided to handle preference conflicts and if something is public property then the way we deal with it is through a political process. I'd rather deal with the Mayor's bad tastes than the local gang member's. At least the Mayor has some plausible claim to represent a majority of the community.
>The local government in my area definitely has aesthetic tastes which are very opposed to mine and I would argue most people in the area.
What if you like my tastes even less and I'm the one who tags the local public building? There's just no perfect solution to problems like this. In my view representative democracy is the least bad. If most people in your area really agree with you then go door-to-door and organize some grassroots action. If you get a bunch of people to sign onto "here's an artist we all like, please let him paint this wall" and present it persuasively at a city council meeting then they might listen to you.
My favorite streetscape art is a mural on the side of a gas station near the lake, depicting said gas station. I think that’s fabulous. Required neither government nor miscreants.
My long comment got deleted, but the short version is that I am a big fan of graffiti because like 40% sucks, but is a small thing, and is always getting replaced by more graffiti artists; 30% is fine/boring/I don't care, and 30% is a net positive, with like 10% of that 30% being absolutely fantastic and awesome.
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQWY3pA1_PrR54rijJpY_1julzsnziL2FZlGg&s
(example of good 30%, maybe very good 10%)
What would you think of a city which had a system deliberately set up to streamline the process of properly negotiating permission for ad hoc art projects? Take a cell phone picture of a random wall plus digital sketch of the proposed decoration, geolocation data gets cross-referenced with real estate records to figure out who owns that structure or otherwise has a formal interest in its appearance, AI agents of the various parties concerned haggle on behalf of their respective humans' aesthetic (or political, etc.) agendas, artist gets a clear answer (approve, deny, conditional concerns, whatever) within minutes rather than the muse being held back by weeks of bureaucracy.
It seems... uh... like, there is no way a graffiti artist would be interested in doing this, no? Half the point is the transgression if I understand correctly.
Almost by definition, though, we're not seeing what more law-abiding types would prefer to add to such surfaces. The civil engineer designing a highway overpass, and the artist with a can of paint and a vision, have too few friends in common, and their respective budgets are too tight to casually reach out.
How is that graffiti? No one could've done that surreptitiously. It would've taken days.
I mean, I do not know the history of that piece, but generally such things are done either a) on abandoned buildings, which are sometimes then re-inhabited, and often these re-inhabitants will keep the art (especially if they are trying to make some sort of 'cool' business; or b) done by a graffiti artist with the permission of and sometimes for payment by the building owner; I call them graffiti because this is what people call them / they come up if you google 'graffiti', although I could see wanting to make a distinction there.
Yeah I'd call the latter a mural or commissioned art. 'Graffiti' sort of implies illegal or transgressive.
I do think a) is properly graffiti, though it is probably less transgressive to modify unused property/unmaintained property (with owner's consent or not, rats & elements are modifying the hell out of it in ways much more expensive than painting a wall).
I'd probably call it a mural myself, to be honest.
Depends on the graffiti. I’ve no patience for the ones that just tag their name and/or slurs everywhere, but occasionally street art can actually be good. I would not object to murals on what would otherwise be blank featureless fencing becoming more normalised. In parts of the world they do this, and the streets that have them are more pleasant for it than the ones with blank featureless walls.
cf. https://maps.app.goo.gl/jUkvvpW6tQzJhfDv8
https://maps.app.goo.gl/Q772AynyfFTVT9to7
etc
I guess a thing that’s consistently happening here is buy-in from all involved: the wall owner is up for it, whatever entity organises the local youth does some minimal vetting for skill etc etc. It’s not a signal of disorder: these places are demonstrably capable of getting walls painted over, they’ve deliberately chosen to channel the graffiti energy to these specific walls instead.
What would you think of a city setting up a system to streamline the process of properly negotiating permission for such art projects? Take a cell phone picture of a random wall plus digital sketch of the proposed decoration, geolocation data gets instantly cross-referenced with real estate records, etc.
If it actually gets buy-in, that sounds amazing!
We have lots of murals here, of varying pleasing-ness.
They too get tagged.
FWIW I think both of those examples are ugly and think they're aesthetically no different than having a country road plastered with tacky billboards. I would much rather have the unadorned brick walls.
Maybe the from-on-high graffiti sanctification is why anti-billboard campaigns are another thing that the past could consider and mount and have occasional success with; and we *cannot*.
Could you elaborate on this? I don't understand what you're proposing, but I would have presumed the reason anti-billboard campaigns nowadays don't get traction is primarily because the advertisers have more political influence than the general population.
You have to have a society in which such a campaign is not dismissed as an unimportant “aesthetic” matter, as with litter; not a priority at all compared to the ongoing project of making what is low, high. And of course, the obvious point that if all surfaces being covered with graffiti is desirable, even the “aesthetic” argument has been undermined. And of course, if you change the structure of society, you lose the people who both cared about it and were in a position to do so with some effectiveness.
Who benefited from such campaigns? Everyone of course, unless the dystopian is the goal.
I like graffiti that's actual artwork, I don't like taggers. Except for Tox (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tox_(graffiti_artist) ), whose work is incredibly simple and samey (just "Tox" followed by the year), but who impresses with his sheer work ethic.
Everybody does. And guys with funny no sequiturs. Love that. Unfortunately, that's not 99 percent of graffiti. The average man's experience of graffiti is investing your heart and soul in a business and coming back the next day to see it covered by senseless bullshit somebody sprayed during five weed-fueled minutes.
So, the point is the city should pay for it, and provide minimal vetting (it helps if you have tons of abandoned buildings, so you're putting up plywood over glass windows).
Get rid of advertising first before whining about graffiti. "I don't want to see it and shouldn't have" is a valid argument but it applies 10x as much to ads than to graffiti because the relationship is adversarial there. If capital gets to force visuals down your eyesockets then so should the common man.
10000000000%
I think this was a banksy quote
> People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
> You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
> Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
> You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
Graffiti is usually vandalism https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/crime-as-proxy-for-disorder/comment/216715900 advertising is not.
This is a definitional argument so loaded with political assumptions of dubious merit that it's not really a useful line of enquiry
One cent (mostly payable to the recipient, but 10% could go to enforcement) per unsolicited e-mail or phone call, and a tax of one tenth of a cent per pageview on targeted online advertising - each frame of any autoplaying video counted separately.
Far easier to legally justify (and harder to evade) than an outright ban. Reduced noise would give any remaining ads more credibility and reach, so marketing departments still get to pull their weight. Less trade volume hurts middlemen (notably google) but, eh... if they're providing a service that everyone hates, that's just democracy in action.
This. I find the prevalence of advertising in the modern world to be far, far more unpleasant that graffiti. I think a lot of it has to do with motives. Graffiti is effectively neutral; it's generally not about me at all. Advertisement is not neutral: it's targeting me and trying to part me from my money. I can largely just ignore either one, of course, but advertisers have much more incentive to keep trying and to make themselves hard to ignore.
Just speaking for myself, but while sloppy vandalizing graffiti is kind of depressing, I hate murals that look like photoshop vomit more.
Even sloppy graffiti might be easier on my nerves than long blank walls.
Graffiti is at least occasionally a pro-social act, e.g. https://thelandmag.com/richard-ankrom-guerrilla-public-service-los-angeles-free/
That's a rare case of graffiti targeted to make life better for middle-class white people like myself, but some of the more common stuff is at least more aesthetically pleasing than a bare concrete wall and I'm open to the possibility that it communicates something useful to its intended audience.
I don't think it's accurate to characterize that as graffiti. Neither the intent nor the effect were expressive. It's more like vigilante civic maintenance.
It expressed a very useful piece of information, But so does a scrawl that is properly understood to mean "This is Gang X's territory". Both are important data necessary to avoid potentially dangerous navigational errors.
Yes, graffiti can be either expressive or territorial. The sign was neither.
What a hero.
Austin has a Bowie Street, of course, because he is one of the Heroes.
I was amazed at the swiftness, practically the morning after David Bowie’s death, that a fairly credible replacement had gone up - “David Bowie St.” The city let it stay up awhile.
I'm a fan of graffiti. You'll have to get through me!
Death penalty, but only if your graffiti is bad. A sort of directed evolution in graffiti making ability.
Absolutely.
I remember one day some lady friends and I arrived at a nature preserve, part of the NWR, at the edge of town. It was an excursion led by REI and I guess my friend was a member. So she signed up for this little field trip, it was like being in school again.
The restroom at the trail head - a limestone structure - was completely covered over with spray painted profanities. Like it had been gift wrapped in scrawled obscenities of all manner. The REI lady got on the horn and called the refuge manager.
When we returned from our hike, a refuge staffer was halfway through scrubbing off the paint. (I remember making a note of what he used, which worked with a great deal of elbow grease, but I’ve forgotten.)
This was his morning, in a place where there was certainly no shortage of tasks, and those actually related to the mission.
People who profess to love graffiti as the ultimate expression, after tattoos, of their own radical chic identity - are wholly responsible for this mundane and maddening occurence.
And, incidentally, for the guy who paints “F*** Biden” on his own garage door, thereby making the houses of everybody around him harder to sell.
Won't someone think of the real estate prices!
Yes, please leave the burned out shell of a meth house next door to me forever! Affordability!
But also, come attend school with my kids!
Ah, I was under the impression you were talking about graffiti but it seems you were talking about something completely different. My bad.
Apples to oranges. If I don't like a piece of graffiti, I can generally just not look at it. Even if it were, say, on a route I used to commute every day, my interaction with it would be extremely brief unless I stopped to stare.
The obnoxious thing about boomboxes (and other sources of loud noise) is that they force you to perceive them for an extended period of time, as long as you are in the vicinity. Oftentimes they do this even if you're in your own home and the boombox player is not. They can prevent sleep, increase stress, interrupt meetings and conversations...the harms are small, but potentially very numerous.
I'm generally not very sympathetic to people's complaints about "public disorder." But noise complaints are more likely to have real teeth, because noise is much better at crossing the boundaries into private spaces than almost any other sort.
from a graffiti artist i talked to last year: public facing walls are public property and anyone should paint on them whatever they want. Also murals-painters are kinda dicks for claiming large spaces for themselves.
Would this apply to outdoor advertisers? I consider them worse than graffiti. They are far more invasive and damaging.
Yes, strict regulation on that too.
What percentage of your paying subscribers live in the San Francisco Bay area?
The Bay Area is incredibly rich, but it lacks the amenities and order of comparable locations like Monte Carlo. There has been exactly one murder in Monaco in recent decades, an Agatha Christie-worthy murder of a a zillionaire by his servants.
The latest mayor of San Francisco seems to be doing a decent job of helping San Francisco live up to its potential.
Yeah, I really feel like this is city dependent. I’ve moved around a lot and have acquaintances in a lot of places, and all the ones complaining about crime and disorder are in San Francisco and DC. Everyone in Mid-Sized cities seem relieved that we are past the BLM crime spike.
It's hardly unreasonable for residents of humongously wealthy cities like SF and DC to complain about crime, while it's hardly unreasonable for residents of moderately wealthy cities to be relieved that crime isn't as bad as it was a half decade ago.
And yet, the DC residents didn't complain, much, when the crime was bad. They just got private security. What you see now is the hoi polloi saying "we were promised great cities! And Beer! And Free GaY Sex!" (okay, so maybe that's more DC than SF).
DC apparently lacks the armed private security of years ago. You know, back when there was open drug use a block or two from the capital? And tripwires in rock creek park?
I continue to hear a lot about the crime spike we've still got going here in my Mid-Sized city, and I heard a lot (pre covid) about the crime spikes (drug related) in small west virginian towns.
I'm reminded of the loud NY journalists hypotheses in vibecession article. Maybe somewhere around those journalists (or modernly, influencers) are getting very bad?
San Francisco’s really wealthy hires their own protection. Those innocuous people parked at a discrete distance are hovering. Additionally they usually have several homes—either in Marin, Atherton or Lake Tahoe if the danger level gets too high. Mayor Lurie has cooled things down considerably. The greatest fear has to be the proposed billionaires tax proposal. Do they really want to take up residence in Florida, Texas or Incline Village, Nevada.
Nice read once again!
Regarding the shoplifting vibe, do you think the increase in visible anti-theft measures is impacting this? I would argue that people seeing more and more cosmetics/whatever behind locked cages at their local grocery or drug store has an impact.
A "The shampoo never used to be behind locked glass, therefore crime must be up" kind of thing?
That could also feed into what you said about the reverse white-flight exposure?
If a drug store chain puts the shampoo in a case in ALL their stores, regardless of where they are, then it becomes much more visible even in low-crime neighbourhoods.
Also, the social media visibility of it all? I never used to see twitter posts about shoplifting sprees from Anytown, USA because A. I didn't use socials nearly as much because it was just for posting filtered photos of lunch compared to now and B. It didn't seem to have the same level of algorithmic success for getting likes.
But I'm totally with you on death penalty for boombox users. Some tarring and feathering and stockades for speakerphone users on public transit too.
Plus maybe there is some correlation-causation argument too - "There are more immigrants/minorities in my state these past few years and now my shampoo is behind a locked case, therefore its the immigrants/blacks/whatever".
> do you think the increase in visible anti-theft measures is impacting this?
Interesting anecdote: I visited the Philippines for the first time a few weeks ago, and this was one bit of culture shock. Any business more organised than a street stall featured armed security guards, and car park attendants at the larger places had mirrors on a stick to check undersides of vehicles for explosives. I must clarify that at no point did I feel threatened by the people around me; it is merely the fact that these precautions were so ubiquitous that made me wonder about safety and put “wow, my local corner store has started putting the blocks of cheese into plastic anti-theft boxes, what on earth is happening to this place?” into perspective.
And the Philippines really isn’t that high crime of a country globally speaking.
I have never actually witnessed shoplifting, but I’m very annoyed by stores putting stuff behind locks, so certainly if I ever complained about shoplifting, I would be talking about stores’ responses to (alleged) shoplifting, not shoplifting itself.
Yep, this is my theory
>If a drug store chain puts the shampoo in a case in ALL their stores, regardless of where they are, then it becomes much more visible even in low-crime neighbourhoods.
My anecdotal experience is that chains don't make these changes in all their stores. Certainly not at a national level.
I live in Austin. When traveling to certain other cities in recent years - Chicago and NYC both come to mind - it has stood out to me when I walk into a Target, CVS, or Walgreen's that I see *far* more items in cases than I do at those same retailers' locations in Austin (or in other cities where I've visited one of their stores).
This difference surprises me, by the way. Austin has a sizable visible homeless population, which has grown considerably vs. 10-20 years ago. A progressive DA (Jose Garza) took office here in 2021. I'd expect retailers, particularly ones located in or near downtown Austin, to experience enough shoplifting losses to justify locking many items in cases. Yet that's not what I've observed.
One thing I’ve noticed is that Walmarts in Texas cities used to have an exit in the plant/lawn furniture area at the far end of the store, but most no longer do - making it much less convenient to run in to pick up some potting soil or tomato plants.
I connect this with seeing a homeless guy walk out of the former outdoor exit with a tent.
1. Anti-theft measures have increased
2. Reported level of theft didn't change
Assuming (2) is true there're two possible explanations
1. Anti-theft measures do nothing.
2. Willingness to steal/disorder has increased.
Graffiti reports doubling in the UK after 2013 could just be Tox getting out of prison: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tox_(graffiti_artist)
Graffiti Georg ruining all of our crime statistics once again
I don’t like feeling omnipresent despair at the impending collapse of everything either.
It's like there's been a rug pull in the vibes. Maybe this is just me getting older, but I do remember being an adult 15 years ago and thinking things would get better in the future.
"I do remember being an adult 15 years ago and thinking things would get better in the future."
Ugh for real! I'm feel so confused. Is this memory I have of being more optimistic of the future also the result of nostalgia bias? It's so hard to disentangle the truth about how the world existed in the past from my deep, emotional bias about how I feel it was, and that includes my perception of my perceptions.
I can imagine a lot of people responding with "I believe what I see with my eyes and I know what I remember! If you're questioning what you see, you're a sheep."
Of course, we all know here that our observations are biased and our memories are reconstructive. Only by constantly doubting my own beliefs and observations can I make accurate assertions about the world. But every so often, like after reading your comment, I'm left with the feeling of "do I even know anything is real?" I guess this is the sort of crisis Descartes went through every day!
EDIT: I should say at least, I think the data does support the claim that people are more pessimistic now than they were in the recent past, but of course I can't say that with certainty as I don't have any data in front of me right now.
I have another one: More people can afford vacations to Europe and East Asia, where things are just orderly, and rightfully complain that things aren’t as good in the US. Doesn’t matter what the local baseline or history is if it just sucks.
A lot of Scott's subscribers live in San Francisco and have been to Prague, Budapest, and/or Tokyo, and are, hardly unreasonably, sore that their hometown of S.F. isn't as nice as these places with half the average per capita GDP of San Francisco.
I finally got to Prague last year, and, wow, it's really nice.
It’s not just that SF is “not as nice”. It’s significantly worse with a much higher budget.
Lol some of this is getting a bit insane. SF is certainly not "significantly worse" than Budapest. Do google maps random pin drop 10x in Budapest and 10x in SF.
I'll give you Tokyo.
In European cities, the tourist sections tend to be particularly orderly, while the lowlifes are exiled to the boring outer sections where tourists don't go. In San Francisco, the tourist section became a disgrace until quite recently, while the boring outer sections like Sunset are Basically Fine.
Not only that, but have been to the touristy parts of Prague / Budapest / Tokyo, and are comparing those tourist-friendly areas to SF as a whole.
Prague and Budapest, away from the city center, aren't particularly picturesque (can't speak to Tokyo), but most tourists won't see that part unless they're trying to find a particularly cheap place to stay.
Warsaw in 2025 looks like what many people in 2014 expected downtown Los Angeles to look like in 2025: lots of new skyscrapers, lots of pedestrians, only a few quaint winos.
Things are not "just orderly" in Europe
Your impression will vary if you just stick to the touristy bits of the big cities.
Yeah classic selection effect because the touristy bits are parts with less disorder. Still, European cities are also full of antisocial behaviors in the streets and in public transportation, and depending on the city you may be forced more to take public transportation VS the USA so you see it more
Yes what a ridiculous comment. Every European city south of Copenhagen is covered in graffiti.
Need to go norther, I guess. I live in Copenhagen, and there's plenty of graffiti around. But... ah.. so what? What are we even talking about here? Scott wrote about the risk of getting called a “Karen”, and I indeed find it very difficult to restrain from using this term here.
I guess graffiti is mostly the product of either bored teenagers without criminal intent or ideologically-motivated underground skilled artists. How is it in the same category as "drug-fueled homeless zombies roaming the streets" or even just shoplifting?
(On the other hand, I'd like to join the "death penalty for boom box carriers" movement please.)
Cool, I'm sure as a hip, urban progressive you don't mind visible signs of disorder, but most people dislike graffiti, which is why most societies have rules against it.
To paint people who dislike graffiti (probably 90% of the population over 30 years old?) as "Karens" is ridiculous. If you like it so much you should advocate for legalization.
No, I don't like graffiti, and I support laws against it. I just don't think it's a big deal, and I'd strongly oppose any suggestion to deal with it harshly. More importantly, I don't think it's a sign of anything going wrong.
To me, things like slight disorder, breaking minor laws, rules disobedience, deviation from norms to some degree and so on are not just symptoms of a healthy society - they're part of the core mechanism that makes a society healthy. I see graffiti as a part of this, not as another component in some structural problem eating away my way of life.
Agreed. But to some it screems IMMINENT COLLAPSE.
Excellent comment, you nailed it. Crying this much about adolescents walking around with their friends and spraypainting their name on walls is the epitome of being a Karen.
It's not like the Karens aren't "technically" correct when they complain about jaywalking or kids playing outside, it's just that they're being annoying and stupid about it (much like the rest of these comments)
And stinks of cigarette smoke!
My impression of every American city I'd ever been to /currently lived in absolutely nosedive after seeing Tokyo /Kyoto/random poor villages in Japan that you've never heard of and I don't remember the names of
Totally.
Asia certainly, but Europe??? There is significantly more graffiti and litter in European countries than even NYC.
New York City in the 21st Century is quite well governed. That wasn't true from the late 1960s into the 1990s, but now NYC has a very low crime rate.
Note that NYC _needs_ a low crime rate: its subway is a wonderful amenity ... when it's orderly, but many people find it terrifying when it is not.
Orderly rape is a new one. I'd like to understand more about this, honestly.
I think both of these posts left out a possibility of "Crime has gotten worse, then life got worse in some way in order to prevent the crime, so now the crime rate is low and life is worse".
Walk only during the daytime, lock up goods in the store, avoid that area of town, head on a swivel, etc.
(Related: These pains can remain in place long after the threat has left. You kind-of alluded to this part).
My wife can recall walking a mile each way to first grade in the Austin neighborhood of Chicago in 1966. Her recollections sound like an urbanist dreamscape: here's my Italian grandmother's house and here's my Irish grandmother's house.
Then Martin Luther King moved to Chicago, and a lot of felonious bad stuff ensued that would sound racist to recount. And so four years later she was living on a farm 63 miles outside of Chicago because her liberal parents had lost half their net worth by betting on integration working out, and her new house didn't have indoor plumbing for their first two years.
Many millions of Americans have similar stories to tell, but virtually nobody in the media is interested in hearing them.
This is true, I grew up in a similar place in the 80s. Parents moved 3 times to get away from crime. When I got older, I realized my family experienced a pogrom. Interestingly, narrative really matters. The narrative of that time is white people were racistly moving away to avoid integrated schools. Rather than we were being beaten and robbed, and ran away. History is written by the winners, and we lost. We lost propaganda war because lower middle class people couldn't articulate what was happening, and did in-fact say and do a bunch of racist stuff, that was pretty bad. You can watch videos of south boston folks saying racist stuff about busing, Or Jesse Jackson actually protested my NY Junior highschool in the 70s because of parents pushing back against integration. The book Canarsie Jews and Italians against liberalism is quite good on this topic. As was the Chris Rock show.
I know this is besides the point, but "Austin neighborhood of Chicago" is interestingly ambiguous
The U. of Chicago sociology department mapped out 87 (?) neighborhoods in Chicago in the 1920. Austin is the very large one on the western border of Chicago, just slightly north of Madison. To the west of it is the famous suburb of Oak Park, with its Frank Lloyd Wright prairie style architecture, which native son Ernest Hemingway sneered at for its "broad lawns and narrow minds." Austin was a nice but less spectacular version of Oak Park. My father grew up in Oak Park, my wife in Austin.
Scott's readers don't hear about that Austin much anymore.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austin,_Chicago
This is what the Post misses. A similar mechanism played out in the Bay Area as well: 1. In the Bay Area, it used to be normal to leave backpacks in your car.
2. Bay Area liberal leadership sold people on not policing/imprisoning as a good idea.
3. Car Break-ins skyrocket. Everyone stopped leaving bags in cars, keeping the level of crime flatter than it otherwise would have been, given constant victim behavior. also many dont bothered reporting the break in to police
4. The liberal media could use those stats propagate a lie that the anti-policing ideas didn't have such a bad effect and would interview "${insert sympathetic case}" instead of the 100,000 normals that had their life made materially more inconvenient by a bad idea from their elected leaders and advocated by the liberal establishment.
5. The normals need to signal boost their experience in the face of the aforementioned incompetent/unsympathetic media. So they exaggeratedly talk about crime to compensate
6. They turn to Fox news / local news that reports on something that vibes with their lived experience. while the liberal media continues to ignore them. They become more extreme and create the disconnect that we are presently confounded by.
This pattern exists for many bad liberal ideas like cancel algebra, remove statue, covid shutdown, and unfettered immigration.
The bag thing is an instance of Friedman's Thermostat, although that's always at risk of becoming a generically unfalsifiable response to crime statistics not following one's guess. It's obviously true in some places (eg. the difference between countries where you can vs can't walk through a park at night might not show up in crime rates), but trying to measure it would require clever study design and not just eyeballing published stats.
I agree with the unfalsifiability. It could be that I got richer than my family, so I was more of a target for a car break-in. Or perhaps parents didn't discuss these issues with their children. Perhaps my family/childhood life was shut in, and as I got older, I went out more, increasing the propensity for such things to happen to me. My anecdote has its own confounders. But I can clearly see that school/Media failed to warn me about this, and warned me about a hundred liberal darling concerns of no use to me. So I "compensate" for that when advising my own family and friends.
The pattern with cars finally ends, if you’re smart*, with leaving your car *unlocked* so that it may be perused without window smashing, which is under your deductible.
*Did you notice the beautiful shining river of auto glass along the road where everyone parks for the greenbelt? Pretty. Like art!
so that's "we can't stop the thieves so the solution is to make it easier for them to steal"?
No, you take all your stuff with you. Though in my case, and one of the reasons I will never sell my car, along with the fact that it doesn't beep when the seatbelt is off, it being a matter of indifference to the car - and the reason I didn't balk an instant at replacing the spark plugs for well more than its blue book value, is that the trunk lever by the driver's seat hasn't worked in years. So I *can* Leave My Valuables in the trunk, it being a lockbox.
Now it's true that where we currently live, your car will be immediately rifled through if you leave it unlocked; and locked, it will not be smashed for the noise, since we all park adjacent to our apartments. The last time it happened (forgetting to lock) to my husband's 2017 vehicle, oddly all that we could detect was taken, was the vehicle manual from the glove box.
Oh no, how will we ever change the clock on daylight savings again? I said. The thief will have to come by and do it for us.
This could also manifest itself as, e.g., San Francisco not having the kind of vending machines that are everywhere in Japan, because they would be broken into within a week. This doesn't show up in a statistic but makes life worse.
"Opportunity Cost" is something that should be carefully studied when thinking about crime.
I think about how my former city, riding the wave of the waning environmental movement which it had once embraced with a certain amount of fervor in comparison to other cities, announced it was going to be a Zero Waste city: everything would be recycled or composted. It even started a curbside fabric recycling program, now forgotten.
Now it spends a great deal of money filling shipping container after shipping container with the vast quantity of Stuff than is left in every woods and drainage, by its homeless population. All for the landfill.
Needless to say there hasn't been a peep about Zero Waste in years.
What people on this blog don't seem to grasp is that they have their exemplars, their forerunners, in the past; and those people who were functionally the same as the commenters here, in terms of their role in society, wanted to do things like "become sustainable".
So it doesn't really matter if people say, what's it to me? I don't care about this. That's Boomer stuff.
No one can care about it anymore. It's part of the loss. And y'all's enthusiasms may well suffer the same fate, as priorities become ever cruder.
It might be true thay theyd be immediately robbed. But vending machines are basically illegal in most of SF due to business permitting and land use regulations. Score another point for Japan style YIMBYism.
Right, I definitely think this is a factor!
Risk compensation models say that observed trends (i.e. a fall in achieved crime rate) understate, not overstate, the underlying cause (a fall in the risk of crime victimization holding constant victim behavior).
Can you explain or point to a source that does? This seems interesting
Risk substitution is the hypothesis that when you make a risky behavior safer, people indulge in the risky behavior more, partially offsetting safety gains. So, e.g., when you add anti-lock brakes to cars, the collision rate goes down by less than you might expect a priori if you just checked how many collisions would have been avoided by reduced stopping distance. This is because people respond to anti-lock brakes by driving faster and following more closely. Similarly, if risky behavior gets more dangerous, people will be more careful, and so the empirical decline in injuries from risky behavior will increase by less than you would expect a priori.
Like Jevons paradox but for risk. Got it.
That seems too convenient. Really, not only have lifestyle changes successfully avoided the crime, those lifestyle changes cut the crime rate by a factor of a few? In addition to every measure of disorder, like graffiti and littering?
Seems pretty reasonable?
If the behavior of the would-be victims is what drew criminals into these victim's previously ordered parts of town, no longer presenting an easy target would make it less likely for criminals to go to those parts of town.
The cycle would be: presenting behavior that makes you an easy victim draws in criminals, criminals generally increase disorder, increased criminality leads to no more victim behavior, diminished victim behavior leads to fewer criminals, fewer criminals leads to less disorderly behavior.
Mind you, I think increased law enforcement is also a big factor, but I think behavior modification is a big part of it.
I'm trying to succinctly express the problem I have with this hypothesis. It's something like "this requires very different parts of the system to be synced up and responsive to each other in ways that just don't seem very plausible."
Like, in order for this hypothesis to hold, a bunch of people in the rich neighborhoods--people who presumably have a decently wide variety of personal experiences and risk tolerances--to coordinate sufficiently well on these self-protective behaviors that the whole community presents a harder target. And then, once the criminals have moved on, they have to continue with the behaviors whose usefulness has now mostly diminished.
You could tell a story where this is all very integrated and adaptive: some people loosen up a little, and the criminals come back a little and target those people, so they stop loosening up. But first, that would seem to require a much higher victimization rate than is actually observed, to carry the signal in that much detail. And second, it seems like you lose any ability to explain the change over time: why would things have shifted slowly but significantly from a higher crime equilibrium to a lower crime one?
Yes, I think something like this could explain the situation with shoplifting. There's an acceptable loss rate for stores, and if the actual loss rate goes higher than that, they lock up certain products.
In some neighborhoods, I've seen men's socks and underwear in locked cabinets at Target. That probably solves the shoplifting issue but it makes it very inconvenient to buy them for myself.
I think there might be additional trends that are part of this phenomenon but aren’t being taken into account. One obvious one is the aging of society, and how that impacts how people perceive and react to both crime and disorder.
Looking at it anecdotally, I was a kid in the high-crime 80s in NJ/NY, and mostly I didn’t *care*. Muggings were things that happened to other people, and I had the typical attitude of invincibility that kids have. Risks were background noise.
Fast forward 4 decades, a career, a wife, a home, and two kids later, and I simply am far more risk averse than I used to be. A weirdo on a bus/train went from something my buddies and I might laugh at, to a mild concern on the way to work, to a potential threat to my young family, to something terrible that might happen to a loved one because I’m not going anywhere near a bus or subway, etc.
Multiply that by millions as the average age of society increases and you have a greater proportion of the population in more risk-averse stages of life, and you might see an objective decrease in various types of crime and disorder coupled with a far greater concern about them.
I was wondering when you were going to bring up the Vibecession post. I have a feeling that there's a lot of "general malaise" going around which underlines a lot of the negativity surrounding issues which appear statistically fine.
If I try and think back to the 2000s and early 2010s, I can't recall much alarm at disorder or crime levels. It feels like very much a recent phenomenon. Take shoplifting as an example. It's hard to see in the stats, but intuitively we would expect shoplifting to rise in difficult economic periods. Nonetheless, I can't recall shoplifting being an issue post 2008. It's only now, post-Pandemic, that shoplifting seems to have risen massively in salience. And I think this is in large part down to a greater propensity towards negative feeling.
Or maybe crime declined post-2008 because crime these days is less due to Jean LeJean stealing a loaf of bread to feed his starving family but is instead due to Crimes of Exuberance?
Violent crime exploded in 2020. This was mostly due to the Floyd Effect, but the Stimmy Checks didn't help either.
By what mechanism do stimulus checks increase crime?
Deaths of Exuberance, such as homicides and traffic fatalities, tend to correlate with cash in pocket, in contrast to Case and Deaton's Deaths of Despair.
Traffic fatalities also increased during the pandemic because congestion was way down, so speeds were up.
Interesting. I'd have thought that death per driver would be up but death per capita would still be down.
When in late May 2025, The Science proved that Blacks shouldn't worry about covid anymore but should instead be out and about protesting racism and the police shouldn't dare pull them over for speeding and search them for illegal handguns, black deaths by traffic fatality and shooting homicide exploded in June 2020 and stayed very high for several more years. In essence, Black Lives Murdered got a few tens of thousands of incremental black lives murdered and splattered on the asphalt, but the press and academia don't like to talk about it because they have so much black blood on their hands, so they attribute it to covid.
As with the idea that the pandemic rather than Hurricane Floyd increased crime, you have to explain why the same pattern was not seen in other advanced countries:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ef/1994-_Motor_vehicle_traffic_deaths_in_road_accidents%2C_by_country.svg
Jean Valjean is a fictional character, while the crime declines in the Great Depression & Great Recession, along with increases in the Great 60s Freakout, are real.
I suspect crime is down because everyone is on their phones now.
Factor in government transfers and material poverty rates did not increase significantly during the Great Recession. Maybe crime didn't increase with the recession because poverty doesn't cause crime, or maybe it's because welfare works. That one data point cannot tell us either way.
This. Depression rates are through the roof, and depression imposes a negative prior on judgments about the world. And so we have the paradoxical phenomenon where life is improving while everyone warns the apocalypse is nigh.
The progressive intersectional theory that society is the reason we don't live in the warmth of collectivism of a relative paradise may be the devil on everyone's shoulder at this point
I have no personal belief in that theory, yet I feel apprehendably demoralized simply by the repetition of the claim. With society delegitimized people feel like things are illegitimate, failing, decaying
> If I try and think back to the 2000s and early 2010s, I can't recall much alarm at disorder or crime levels.
I remember the opposite. I remember reading about how people's perception of crime was much higher than actual crime, around the late aughts. The standard thing to blame was the media and the 24 hour news cycle, which needed to bring in eyeballs with a constant stream of fear-inducing crime stories.
I think everyone remembers that. People kept being told that other people were worried about crime, but that they shouldn’t be. Now we’re all being told that the country is falling apart, and if we can’t see the horrible people we keep hearing about it’s because they’re outside our bubbles.
>It's only now, post-Pandemic, that shoplifting seems to have risen massively in salience
All those videos out of SF and NYC of groups just walking into stores and walking back out with bags full of stuff probably play a role in that perception.
Could just be me aging but the soft-judge phenomenon seems to be more prominent than it was from 90s-00s, and that certainly plays a role in the perception of crime in some bubbles.
I've seen the difference between apple turning the flippin phones off once stolen, and just giving them away to the looters. The shoplifting tends to end when the shoplifters are keelhauled and Not Paid To Shoplift by "Well Stupid Companies." (stupid instead of well-meaning, because I don't think they meant well at all, for anyone).
If you look carefully at weekly statistics from 2020, it's clear that the main impact on homicides, traffic fatalities, and other forms of crime and disorder was not covid in March 2020 but the George Floyd "racial reckoning" in late May 2020. But the media blaming it on covid raises fewer questions about the wisdom of the media.
This makes me wonder if the issue is more one of visibility rather than actual disorder.
Up until 2000 or so: Disorder that is not newsworthy or that is against the main media narrative of the day (like the local crime that drove a lot of white flight) gets very little reporting, so people only see the bits that they happen across.
2000-present: More and more of the disorder is captured on video/photos and shared widely, so things that were known about but seldom seen become more visible and more salient.
I think this pattern happened wrt police brutality--my low-confidence impression is that US police are less brutal, corrupt, and racist now than at basically any point in the past[1], but once cellphone videos of a cop kicking the sh-t out of someone for excessive mouthiness start popping up on Youtube, it *feels* like the cops have suddenly gone nuts and started beating everyone up all the time.
[1] I'd guess this statement is true for basically any time from 2000-present, though I am open to data to the contrary.
Yeah, I think it's a combination of negativity bias and visibility.
And a bit more specifically than just visibility, like you point out about cellphone videos, it's the virality. Maybe 30 or 40 years ago an isolated case of police brutality was basically local news, but now it becomes national news in less than a day, and people wholly disconnected from it get outraged (regardless of the quality of their actual local police).
This makes sense when you think of BLM protests overseas--whatever problems exist in the UK or France wrt policing, they are surely very different from the problems that exist in Minneapolis, USA.
>Take shoplifting as an example. It's hard to see in the stats, but intuitively we would expect shoplifting to rise in difficult economic periods.
I would not expect that. Look at how homicide didn't increase during the Great Depression.
Homicide is likely to have very different drivers than shoplifting? I'd never stolen stuff when I had reasonable amounts of money. I've stolen stuff when skint -- not starving level skint but just very poor. Sure, personal anecdote ain't data but this is fairly plausible mechanisms: people want to steal stuff more when they can't buy it. Whether they will steal it will depend on many other factors of course.
Violent crime doesn't have such obvious and clear possible relationship to "less money". There might be indirect causality via stress for example, but not as obvious.
When you stole something, did the shopkeeper know about it, and let you get away with it? There's "still a payin' customer" levels of stealing, and then there's the rent-a-cop will splat you on the ground level of stealing.
It was always big supermarkets, I'd not steal from identifiable people, and I am fairly certain staff didn't know, but maybe? UK supermarkets do prosecute shoplifters, but idk how consistently. I just walked out with things like large packets of nappies in the bottom basket of my (middle class looking, three wheeler/all terrain, tho second hand) pram that I just wouldn't put on the checkout belt. Wine bottle or squash or, idk, coffee or nice cheese in the folded hood. Jar of jam in jacket pocket. Yes, still a paying customer -- they likely still made profit of my other purchases overall even with the stolen stuff.
Knew a guy who worked produce in a rural supermarket. He'd probably have let you take the nappies (you're still buying the inordinately expensive baby food, after all), but the wine? or cheese? or Jam? Wouldn't have flown.
But you'd be surprised how much folks notice and don't say boo about, particularly if you look regretful and are doing it for your kids (and otherwise pay your money like a good person do).
If you were doing this after 2014, you may have been benefitting from the perception (well-founded or otherwise) that nobody in the criminal justice system would do anything about shoplifting as long as each offence involved less than £200. https://fullfact.org/government-tracker/immunity-shoplifting-law/
Regardless, while I’m sure things were tough for you at the time, UK supermarkets operate on incredibly thin profit margins (their profits rely on bulk), which is why UK food prices are relatively low. Stealing a bottle of wine could easily have made you an overall loss as a customer. People stealing from supermarkets increases the price of food for everyone.
(EDIT: Tesco has profit margins around 4%, but the other major supermarkets are lower. Asda, Morrisons, Lidl and Aldi have profit margins below 2% https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/66a3326dab418ab055592d95/Groceries_2.pdf)
Early 2000s, so the £200 thing wouldn't apply. Also, I'm not sure how much of a factor this is as I've seen (in the actual court -- my work takes me there occasionally nowadays, not thieving from 25 years ago) people charged with stealing sandwiches from a SPAR, leg of lamb from somewhere I forgot and £36 worth of clothing from M&S. All in Scotland, maybe that makes a difference.
After George Floyd's demise on May 25, 2020, the American Establishment (politicians, media, academia, corporations, etc.) made clear that blacks should be policed less.
So, blacks partied more, drove faster, carried guns with them more, stole more, and shot each other more.
Economists Case and Deaton coined the term Deaths of Despair in 2015 for deaths by suicide, opioid overdose, and alcoholism.
In 2021, I coined the term Deaths of Exuberance for homicides and motor vehicle accidents.
For example, it was widely predicted in March 2020 that lockdowns would lead to more domestic murders. That made sense, but it barely happened.
Instead what did happen was a huge explosion of mass shootings at black parties post-George Floyd (not the carefully planned Columbine-style mass shootings) but the more wounded than dead mass shootings where one lowlife feels dissed so he pulls out his illegal handgun and starts blasting away in the general direction of the disser, hitting people standing around in the background eating a plate of ribs.
Or takes a more minor law infraction. Private fireworks are illegal in California, so after the first stimulus check and the rent moratorium, lots of working class Southern Californians drove to Nevada and bought a ton of fireworks. Thus July 4, 2020 in Los Angeles heard unbelievable numbers of frontyard fireworks going off from 8pm to 3am nonstop. Check out the traffic helicopter views of July 4, 2020 in Los Angeles.
Similarly, the rise of shoplifting was not due to hunger and despair, but due to the retreat of the cops during the Racial Reckoning, so lots of people had a blast looting stores.
It's fun.
I would lay the blame at the feet of negative engagement mass media.
>The problem: people hate crime and think it’s going up
I believe this is the quasi-universal experience across all modern societies. If that's the case, why would the modern USA's attitude require a special explanation?
On that note, what is the experience of other countries? UK crime seems to have been mainly straight up from the beginning of the 20th century till 1991, then declining.
https://www.parliament.uk/contentassets/90b7f09a39a74dbcaa34acdfe7a210cb/olympicbritain.pdf#page=159
The UK has two datasets (Police Recorded Crime and Crime Survey of England and Wales) which have an irritating tendency to go in different directions, and probably not for the fun causal reason that occurs to people.
The crime people care about for the purposes of the UK's version of this debate (robbery in London) has seemingly gone up in the last few years.
> the fun causal reason that occurs to people
All the crime is in Scotland?
Sadly neither data set includes Scotland. I'd call it the British Greenland, but given Trump already owns parts of it that could be risky...
In recent years UK has had big surges in shop-lifting, illegal sales of smuggled tobacco products, county-lines drugs and drink-spiking. Probably also in grooming gangs but that tends to stay off the radar. We've also had big increases in computer crime altho much of that originates abroad.
I wonder if the feeling of increased crime correlates with the view that there's no point in reporting it to the police cos they won't do anything, and if so which is the cause and which the effect?
Surely no-one really cares about "illegal sales of tobacco products"? It's a purely admin type "crime" that maps to nothing but admin rules about revenue collection ?
The drink spiking spike is likely largely a reporting artifact following numerous awareness campaigns and the (pretty much completely spurious) needle spiking panic of 2021. Some info here: https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5802/cmselect/cmhaff/967/report.html
People sure seem to care when they think the illegal tobacco is a wartime drone from Russia, so sure, at least someone, somewhere cares about illegal sales of tobacco products.
(Not commenting about the Isles in particular, you understand).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Eric_Garner
A man was killed by a police officer for suspicion of selling single cigarettes.
The police may care about it, but how many normal citizens are upset that there is someone out there selling cigarettes without the right permission/taxes being collected?
As written, this is misleading. It's not the case that selling single cigarettes carried a death penalty; rather, Garner was being charged with selling singles and died in the process of apprehending him because of a pre-existing medical condition and Garner choosing to resist arrest.
The plural of anecdote is not data. But given your lack of context on the UK I will add that my impression of London is not of graffiti doubling since peak London in 2012. It feels pretty stable, as does littering. Far less graffitied than US cities, far more than Asian ones. Mixed versus Europe but probably lower on the whole. Zurich for instance appears far safer and cleaner but does seem to have more graffiti. I think maybe there's been a slight shift in tolerance to "street art". Violent crime in the UK feels down (confident), disorder feels flat, shoplifting feels slightly higher, bike theft seems higher but maybe just getting more attention for lack of policing, online/phone based fraud feels massively up (very confident).
I'll second that, London doesn't feel more graffitied than it has in the last couple of decades; there was a brief period a year ago when a large chunk of the tube trains got heavily graffitied in one go, either because someone broke into the depot or because of some kind of policy change about cleaning them.
Mostly outside London, there was a moderately sized wave of graffiti over Gaza last year, almost all of it relatively well-drawn Palestinian flags, which I'd guess get reported a lot more than "Stubzy woz ere" does so might be outsized on the statistics.
The plural of anecdote absolutely is data, in a direct and unambiguous way. Hell, the original saying was in fact "the plural of anecdote is data." Pet peeve of mine when people regurgitate cliches without even thinking about the words mean ("the purpose of a system is what it does" is another example that comes to mind form some reason I can't quite put my finger on).
The problem with anecdotes-as-data-points is that they are not sampled in any kind of uniform way. Anecdotes are sampled for interestingnesss, memorability, etc.
I don't know whether the original formulation was "the plural of anecdote is data" or "the plural of anecdote is not data" but the latter makes more sense.
Now you're moving the goalposts by changing it from a statement about data to a statement about quality of data. The statement that you think makes more sense is, literally, incorrect.
Presumably the plural of anything is data if data is just a collection of information. Peeve on.
The plural of anecdote is not quality data that we can use to inform discussions or decisions. The shorthand for quality data that we can use to inform discussions or decisions is data. It was not written without thought.
When you say shoplifting feels slightly higher, what is informing that feeling? I assume it's not like graffiti where you have some rough estimate of how much you've personally witnessed.
It didn't get a confident attached to it because the sample set is low - as you say there's a lot less to look at. But I have witnessed some shoplifting recently. I've never seen it first hand in the past but I did hear second hand accounts of it. On balance - seeing myself feels like more but it wouldn't take a lot to change my mind.
I went ahead and looked it up. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cq8z8kdd8zvo
BBC: Recorded shoplifting offences top half a million
Shoplifting offences recorded by police forces in England and Wales, years ending March 2003 to 2025
> "house prices are up since the pandemic, so it’s no surprise that there are more homeless people, and more of the usual bad things downstream of homeless people"
Do we have good reason to believe in such causality? I'd imagine that the type of homelessness that is caused by expensive housing (regular people crashing at a friend's house or staying at a motel or sleeping in a camper van or whatever) differs from the type of homelessness that causes bad things (mentally ill people living on the streets in the middle of a city).
There's an extensive treatment of this somewhere I can't find right now, but the shirt answer is that "regular people crashing on a sofa" is way more likely to eventually turn into "messed up people on the street" when house prices are very high. There are a lot of people who are borderline one or the other: basically stable and functional if they're inside and with some support, but can go off the rails if sleeping rough with druggies.
Yes, this is well-studied. The YIMBY folks are all over this, because a common NIMBY argument is that homelessness has nothing to do with housing supply, homeless people are just schizophrenic drug addicts, what can you do.
Yes, Zillow even conducted a big study about this. Homelessness goes up as housing prices go up, and the inflection point is when housing exceeds a third of your income.
Mental illness alone is not a cause of homelessness. Where rents are only $300-$600/month (as in Tokyo), mentally ill people can still afford an apartment even with just a part time job.
https://www.zillow.com/research/homelessness-rent-affordability-22247/
No one is questioning that higher housing costs cause more homelessness – that's just basic supply and demand. What I'm questioning is whether (or to what extent) it causes the sort of disordered homelessness that has large negative externalities, such as one hears about happening in San Fransisco, and not just the marginal homelessness that lots of regular people go through.
I vividly remember the smell of one Tokyo man who I presume must have been homeless as a result of mental illness. Quite possibly there were other causes as well, but I would presume that some sort of mental disorder was the main one.
Good point, people homeless due to inability to afford rent don't smell bad, sleep in tents, beg for money, use drugs.... (eye-roll)
I know a family that has a kid, now around 20, who refuses to go to school or get a job. If the parents didn't have a spare bedroom, he'd be homeless.
I'd hardly pin that on high prices though. Any price over 0 would result in that for someone who refuses to have any income.
My point is that he's NOT homeless, but would if the family were not able to afford a spare bedroom for him. The way it's looking right now he might wind up kicked out and homeless anyway.
More generally, I think there are a fair number of people in this general category--they are not homeless because of the kindness/charity of family/friends/church/whatever, or because they have some precarious stability thanks to some kind of retirement or disability or public assistance. But also this is a kind of safety net that can go away really quickly if, for example, you are scary/violent/crazy enough that your brother decides he's no longer willing to let you stay in the same house as his kids, or that your buddy who was letting you sleep in his spare room decides that enough is enough and gives you the boot.
I was that kid. No one could figure it out. The family did not understand. They tried to move it through the mental health system -- the doctors did not understand. My community did not understand -- they thought bricks and mortar reality made sense for me.
It has been a lifetime of struggle to escape society. Everyone is my enemy. For some strange reason that I could never fully explain but knew was true I needed to live apart from others. There were all these friends and money and fun --- none of that was for me. It has been an endless battle against keeping the waves of people out of my life-- Even to this day the battle continues.
Until now no one had ever been able to clearly say why this might be. Why would people seem so contrary to social norms? Throughout all of human history the mystery of what makes people who they are has not been known with any great precision.
However, after a lifetime ... I finally know. I had my full genome sequenced. It was a jaw drop moment.
I have polygenic scores near 90th or approaching the 100th percentile for:
- schizophrenia
- PTSD
- autism adjacent behavior and
- anxiety disorder.
Other close family exhibit all of these traits. My family also has dominant Alzheimer's disease. Early stage cognitive impairment of a parent became evident when I was a teenager; later this progressed to very severe dementia . As a teenager, none of this context was provided to those outside of our family.
The many years of unrecognized and untreated PTSD has largely conditioned me to accept myself as having schizoid personality disorder. This was not inevitable, but the many years of untreated trauma has made me very glad to simply not have PTSD type responses.
What does all this mean for the NEET in question?
My first observation would be to understand other people's reality as valid. People are playing out the genetic script that their parents have given them. People are exactly what their genetics has told them to be. Forcing normative reality onto a genetic script that is not normative is very unhelpful. It is easy to float through school without ever being made to realize that you are expected to accept normative reality. For me, almost immediately when I became recognized as an adult I was expected to embrace normative understanding of the social world. Yet, for me this was simply not who I was. It probably would be better to think about this earlier in life. With genetics known at birth shaping a life for people becomes dramatically easier. I see homelessness, prison and mental hospitals as largely an attempt at negative conditioning. Basically, punish people until they accept normative reality. Given our current knowledge of genetics that seems a hopelessly unwise strategy. For me, there is largely no way, given my genetics, that I could accept normative reality. Punishment without a purpose.
Full genomic sequencing with full polygenic scores would also be highly sensible. The technology is underdeveloped, but the headline type results near the tails above 90 and below 10 percentiles start to give you some idea of what is happening.
With polygenics it is important to understand is that two phenotypically normal people can produce offspring that might be fairly far tail. An offspring might be 1 or 2 SD for a trait that neither the parents have. That can make things difficult. My parents had no insight into the problems that I was having because they did not share the problems to the extent that I did. So, simply knowing what the problem is could be helpful. You could then seek out others in bricks or mortar or online that also share understanding into what you might be coping with; medical professionals who lack lived experience with mental disorders can be surprisingly unaware of the true nature of psychopathology. Almost all of the advice given to me by normies was exactly the wrong advice.
The level of ignorance related to this question is simply startling. I have found that no matter how progressive people might claim to be they simply will not tolerate this type of neuro-divergence. My perspective is that society has been profoundly abusive towards those who are different and simply will not offer reasonable accommodations that could make life easier for them. The resulting costs to society are truly enormous. As soon as I set myself in a life that worked for me (remote, socially isolating, etc.), life has been great. School choice would have been such a blessing for me. It would have allowed me to have more control over my life and to help form the social world that was compatible with my personality.
It has taken a lifetime of hardship to finally reach the life that I am genetically programmed to live. After struggling against my family, friends and community I am finally very very happy; my life has actually worked out surprisingly well (as long as I walk in the precise opposite direction that is suggested to me by normative reality everything is great for me). I hope that my life experience can help the child in question avoid a similar life of adversity. Hopefully, it can add a bit of insight into this situation and help things to turn out better.
Recently, a report was described of an individual who scored in the top 1% for schizophrenia, AND bipolar illness AND autism. That is a truly astonishingly rare combination. You would expect that in one in a million people. This person was also orphaned as a teenager. He was unable to successfully enroll in art school. He then spent several years homeless.
That was Adolf Hitler.
How could someone with such profound life challenge be offered zero community support? The social anosognosia is startling! Might the normative assumption that everyone is largely the same living the same basic life plan be incorrect? The resulting social devastation that Hitler wrought on the world was then the consequence of the ignorance.
People say "Never again" and yet the obvious policy steps to achieve this have never actually been enacted. The correct policy response is self-evident -- people at truly profound life disadvantage should be provided for -- not told to live on the street. A 1 in a million social backstop wound not be expensive -- surprisingly many even with considerable disadvantage need very minimal resources; more simple accommodations. Indeed a $1 insurance premium to fund those with 1 in a million genotypes would cover these ultra rare instances. For whatever reason parents of newborns do not find it worthwhile to protect our future and make such a payment. That is the world that they want to bring their newborn into.
The irony that I have seen in my own life experience (with considerably less profound disadvantage) is that life can then work out surprisingly well. For me, something as simple as online learning has been transformative. Once the social landscape is removed, I have had zero life problems. Notably this option was never offered to me before college. Yet, when resources are withheld completely even when desperately required that the outcome can be especially bad.
The lesson then is not so much that the 1 in a million people are inherently the problem, but it is more the profound obliviousness of the community to provide reasonable care for those in extreme need. With modern technology it only requires a $50 gene chip at birth to identify those who will need help and then provide it to them (when and if needed). No nation has yet realized how critically important it is to spend that $50.
The Santa Ana river in Orange County, CA had about 10,000 white opioid addicts camped there, largely from the midwest, living along it in 2018. They tended to come to SoCal for the 3 months of drug rehabilitation under Obamacare. But after 3 months, they still loved drugs. Plus, the weather in Orange County was a lot nicer than in Kentucky. And their old lady back home had moved in with their best friend. So, rather than go home to Kentucky, they went to Walmart and bought a lot of camping gear. You can buy a lot of meth and fentanyl when you are not paying rent, so why not live in a high-rent part of the country with nice weather?
High housing prices don’t just turn stably housed people into people crashing on their friend’s couch - they also turn people who can host their friend on their couch to people who don’t have enough space to help out a friend who needs help. Scott posted a link to a good study about this a few months back, which found that the increased difficulty of providing bridge housing to friends and family is actually a really big effect.
Sure, it makes sense that that would have an effect on where homeless people sleep. E.g. I believe that in Tokyo (where small homes are the norm), it is common to sleep in 24h internet cafés and similar establishments. The part I'm not so convinced about is where that would lead to an increase in the type of homeless that cause this disorder that people are experiencing in places like San Fransisco.
There are two types of homelessness: the invisible kind where you are sleeping on a friend or relative's couch because you are between jobs; and the visible kind where you are sleeping on the street because you spend every penny you get on drugs and nobody who knows you will never let you in their house anymore after the various Bad Things you've done to them and to their kids.
The second kind of homelessness where you pay no rent is most common in high rent districts like Venice Beach. If you aren't going to pay any rent, why live in some depressing low rent district? Instead, it makes sense to live large at a world famous beach. It's also easier to get money surrounded by tourists and rich people than in some working class neighborhood.
Masked federal agents mudering people in broad daylight bothers me a lot more than having my shampoo locked behind glass.
Huh, I just noticed that your comment seems a lone voice on the topic here on ACX. Scott hasn't made any reference to the ICE scandals so far, has he. Too culture-wary? I'm skeptical.
And maybe I haven't been reading the open threads thoroughly, but I don't recall reading anything about it there, either.
I wonder if my impression is off or if there really is a very drastic ignoring of the situation in these circles.
I imagine it is in part a desire to not, especially not before the story has settled, dive into the culture war. I don’t remember a George Floyd post immediately after that, either.
I guess you're right - I had the impression that the ICE scandals are quite old by now (I'm not from the US), but at least the first killings seem to be "only" a month old.
Agreed, and I think there's wisdom to the approach. Delaying posts on these topics gives them room to be thoughtful and to adopt the wide view, rather than being narrowly focused and reactionary. What would an immediate post even say? "I'm generally opposed to unprovoked extra-judicial killings by government-employed quasi-peacekeeper agencies"? Sure, join the club.
I don't know if there's a name for it, but practicing the societal equivalent of a civility pause over issues like this just seems like good sense.
Yeah, a post on that subject right now seems like all downside and no upside for Scott and a large portion of his readers.
It’s a little strange to say he’s trying to avoid culture war posts when he’s right in the middle of a sequence of attempts to appease the other side in the culture war!
Yeah, Scott doesn't ignore culture war topics, but he'll only weigh in if he has something interesting to say about it, preferably something that floats above the fray and takes a "here's where both sides are wrong" point of view.
There just doesn't seem to be anything all that interesting to say about this topic. Most of it comes down to very precise details about police training and procedures, and pretty soon you're measuring wheel angles.
I don't think your impression is off. To his credit, Scott did mention "pushing back against claims that we should take the authoritarian bargain to stop it", but I don't think he or the ACX community really wants to reckon with the authoritarian bargain we have already made.
Aside from crimes the US government is committing against its own citizens (which are not limited to murder), there is an argument to be made that in fact the west has "fallen" due to the disorderly behavior of the Executive Branch of the US government over the last 12 months. In the (not necessarily very) long run this is likely to have far greater impact on American's lives and prosperity than CVS putting shampoo bottles behind glass cases.
But I think many are just hoping that AI will save us (despite the extensive efforts of many in the rationalist/ACX community to explain why this is a foolish hope).
> Aside from crimes the US government is committing against its own citizens (which are not limited to murder), there is an argument to be made that in fact the west has "fallen" due to the disorderly behavior of the Executive Branch of the US government over the last 12 months.
I love a good argument that the West has fallen but Oswald Spengler published The Decline of the West in 1918 and 1922 so I have trouble taking seriously the argument that it was because of something that happened in the last 12 months.
To be fair, not everyone in the broader ACX community is ignoring these issues, Zvi felt compelled to say something about ICE in his most recent blog post (https://thezvi.substack.com/p/monthly-roundup-39-february-2026), even though it is well outside his usual baliwick. And Zvi reliably criticizes the administration on topics such as tariffs, chip exports, energy, grift, that are directly relevant to his blog. I don't think Zvi is ignoring the domestic situation (and how bad it is in general, this is not just about ICE) to the extent many others are.
I've seen a few discussions in open threads here, but I can't remember if they were in the public threads or the subscriber-only threads. If I recall correctly, majority opinion was along the lines of "sending poorly trained agents with guns into big protests is culpably bad policy," but I might be biased in my recall.
Scott himself seems interested in more-quantifiable harms like aid cuts or RFK
Go back a few Open Threads. People argued about the Renee Good shooting right after it happened.
This comment was on Open Thread 418. A Minneapolis resident described his experience and what he'd been witnessing. It turned into a very long comment chain.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-418/comment/205404360
Thanks!
One situation is rare and self-selected, the other common and beyond one's control.
Its true that most people can just ignore shoplifting by doing their shopping on Amazon, but just because it’s rare doesn’t mean that we should ignore it entirely.
I don't think they can, actually. The proper new term for shoplifters is porch pirates, and most working men (as opposed to the pajama class) can't avoid them with any regularity, or at least without expense.
I don't think it should be ignored entirely, either.
But it should be entirely understandable that people apply a different valence to something that affects them directly daily or weekly compared to something that affects them quite distantly once or twice a year, if that.
Somewhat related to this in the sense of powerful people creating disorder, I wonder to what extent elite impunity (Epstein files, more open bribery and corruption) makes people more sensitive to crime at all levels. Are we more primed to notice disorder in our own experience (even if it is lower than what we experienced without noticing as much before) because we see it at higher levels of society? Algorithmic sharing of crimes on social media could also prime us in the same way.
You do realize the DC Madam was operating for decades? America's never been a shining example of uncorrupt behavior.
You do realize the Obamas got into one of the "good schools" in DC for their kids? That might not have been an outright bribe, but those schools and placement in such are nearly ALWAYS a bribe.
If you don't realize the corruption that's already there, you have no basis for saying you understand what Trump is doing. (And this, I hear from someone who says Trump encourages his family to bet on his decisions -- why not make some cash off gulls?).
I do realize corruption has always existed and didn’t just start with Trump, being as I wasn’t born yesterday. The brazenness now is significantly different as compared to much of the 20th and early 21st century, the span of time most relevant to people’s perception of crime
Sure and beans only make boys fart.
Kitty History, 1 2 3!
"It is time the nation woke up and realized that it's not the armed robbers or drug dealers who cause the most economic harm, it's the white collar criminals living in the most expensive homes who have the most impressive resumes who harm us the most. They steal our pensions, bankrupt our companies, and destroy thousands of jobs, ruining countless lives." --Harry Markopolos
>You do realize the Obamas got into one of the "good schools" in DC for their kids? That might not have been an outright bribe, but those schools and placement in such are nearly ALWAYS a bribe.
Lol, but not I think in this case...
"Who are the new applicants for places at our prestigious and much sought after school?"
"Oh, one is the presidents daughter and the second is the presidents other daughter...."
"Welcome aboard!"
Not sure you'd need to bribe any school to get such prestigious alumni and/or members of the PTA waved in past any normal processes.
Do you realize that you've just said that every school is populated by narcissistic teachers? I mean, that might be right, but... I'm going to continue to hope that there is a school, somewhere, where that's not the case. (Remember that certain schools are magnets, there to nourish specific talents -- those are the ones I'd hope we could find at least one that would say "you're the president's daughter, and you aren't qualified").
What? What have the teachers got to do with it? Admissions decisions will be made by the principal/head or an administrator. Teachers don't get to choose their intake. They will have no input into this decision.
The principal/head/admin are interested in the profile of their school, and its ability to attract future pupils, alumni donations and general school reputation. Thats literally their job. Having the presidents children at your school is going to boost its attractiveness to other pupils with rich parents. Taking them into your school is an absolute win for them even if they're thick as pig sh*t.
Seeing as you started this convo on "we all know bribes are paid to join these prestigious schools" ... just on the basis that "if we take the presidents children, we can extract larger ~~bribes~~ donations from dozens of other parents keen to put their kids in the same school as the presidents children" its an absolute no brainer.
Maybe Mr "Deca-Millionaire" has to donate to get his kid a place, but any school in the country would take the presidents kids. Particularly if its a school who's business model relies on "extracting the maximum possible donations from many Mr Deca-Millionaires" as taking the presidents kids will extract larger donations from many Mr Deca-Millionaires than they otherwise could have extracted.
That would bother me too. Fortunately it's not happening. Neither of those deaths were murder. At worst they were manslaughter. Police make mistakes and if you go out of your way to provoke them into making them then in my view you deserve what you get. Having my shampoo locked behind glass does, in fact, bother me much more. If I had the choice between eliminating the need for shoplifting deterrents and bringing Renee Good back to life, I would choose the former without much deliberation.
I decline to use the word "deserve" here, because I think it implies everyone had plenty of time to sit down and consider all the factors before concluding that Renee Good deserved to die, and then solemnly carried out the verdict.
Based on what I saw, Good put herself in a high-risk-of-death situation, but I also believe it's not the case that everyone who puts himself or herself in a high-risk-of-death situation "deserves" to die for it. One arguably deserves the risk, not the payoff or lack thereof. In her case, it was decidedly on her in the sense that there were other, much safer ways she could have gone about protesting.
Oh sure. I didn't mean that in a deliberative wheels-of-justice way. I meant it in the same way you'd say it about a burglar who tried to break in through a skylight and then fell to his death, or about a drunk driver who got injured in an accident. Some combination of "that's on them" and "it's nice when bad things happen to bad people".
Those were bad, but the sentiment was there in 2024. I guess it’s true that the media started presenting protesters as scary during Trump I.
I think it would be beneficial to consider some lines of inquiry that are less generous to the people who are sure that crime has gotten worse since they were children In the late 1980s and early 1990s. That's not really the ouvre of this blog, which is a good thing, but in this case this level of generosity probably leads one astray. Reading the comments from the previous post I'm inclined to attribute the vibe crime wave to one of the following.
(1) Conservative people care a lot about and are horrified by crime. I have become more conservative. Therefore crime has increased.
(2) In the past, I was younger, more attractive, and more hopeful. These are good things. Low crime is also a good thing. Therefore in the past crime was lower.
(3) As I have gotten older, the world has changed in ways that are confusing and sometimes scary. Crime is also confusing and scary. Therefore crime has increased.
Not so much "lines of inquiry" as various ways to formulate "my opponents are big dumb-dumb-heads & are totally wrong for dumb-dumb reasons, lmao"; not sure I can see much utility in the exercise (aside from, perhaps, personal feelings of satisfaction or the like).
If someone is really confident about a narrative that's contradicted by the evidence and remains confident after seeing the evidence, these are hypotheses that are worth considering. At some point, "my opponents are big dumb-dumb-heads" becomes a realistic possibility.
Alas, when people tried that- quite accurately- in 2020, it didn't go well for them. Why do you expect it to work here? Just because calling conservatives stupid is more acceptable in your social groups than calling progressives stupid?
I have no qualms calling both stupid.
Most people are kinda dumb, but why is the existence of a left half of the bell curve manifesting in a widespread belief that there's more crime and disorder now than in the past when it's hard to see so much evidence of that in available data?
This is not a new phenomenon. People have always said that crime is getting worse.
Yes, that was my point about considering less generous reasons that people believe these things. I think that's the more parsimonious explanation for why people believe this stuff.
You honestly think that none of those are reasonable possible explanations for any percentage of the observations? Your blanket (100%) dismissal seems far more egregious than his suggestion that observer bias might account for some (non 100%) of observations.
Actually, between the two comments, I think Abe's is the closer to implying that "100% of the explanation is X"; mine can't (or maybe it can, but wasn't intended to) be read as saying that *none* of the trend is caused by people being dumb-dumb-heads—just that it's hard to go anywhere interesting once you're positing this as the sole, or a near-universal, explanation.
I.e., it functions as a sort of "stop thinking about this" indicator. Warrantedly so, I suppose, when true—but I feel like we'd want to be pretty sure before ceasing inquiry on such a basis.
(That said, I do find it useful upon occasion—for example, it appears nearly without exception as the cause of disagreements with yours truly, according to my investigations–)
If you want to read, “we should consider other lines of inquiry,” as totally blaming 100% of a problem on something, you are welcome to. And perhaps, he was intentionally misrepresenting his position and he does believe that it’s 100% responsible. But the literal meaning of his words are essentially the opposite of blaming “100%."
And if you read my objection to your misrepresentation of the obvious meaning of his words, as putting me in the 100% camp, this suggests that you are misreading what people are saying by assuming that any questioning of the views you hold dear, automatically relegates the person to the exact opposite political position of your own.
Rather than taking Abe’s point as an attack on opponents, I think we might reasonably take his lines of inquiry as Kahneman-style systematic errors of thought to which we all might be subject. To take those ideas seriously, we’d need more evidence than we have, but I’d consider them worth some thought. I have seen the dumb-dumb head and he is me.
The fact that in the entire period since 1989, there have only been three years when a majority of Americans didn’t think crime was increasing, suggests that this sort of bias is a really important part of any explanation of perceptions! (And interestingly, 2025 was one of those three years, when only 49% of people thought crime was increasing.)
Even if their takes are not based on evidence, and the absolute crime rate really is going down, have you considered that this rising anger and resentment can be politically utilized to take more decisive action against crime? We do not need to settle for the levels of crime we have now, and this narrative is helping to create support for solutions.
If you think in terms of “solutions” you’re setting yourself up for perpetual disappointment. I think it’s better to ask for clear eyed evaluation of the problems that exist so we can try to make them better, rather than using a false narrative of decline to drive focus that you hope will completely eliminate a problem that likely can never be eliminated.
Obviously 0 crime is unrealistic, and no one is seriously asking for that. But there are countries that do not have anywhere near the problem we do, so major improvements are absolutely possible. Unfortunately, many of the solutions are not possible in a society where otherwise productive people are going out their way to defend the dregs of society, so narratives like the one we see here are necessary for changing public sentiment.
You can also politicize anger and resentment to create support for an oppressive police state and compete loss of liberty. If it's possible to create the impression that crime is high despite it being low, then there is nothing to stop an ever tightening ratchet eventually depriving us of all liberty.
People have always been getting older. My sense is that “the media and social media” are presenting crime as out of control now more than it did say 15 years ago. I guess maybe the media sources I’m aware of are changing their target demographic as the people aware of them grow up?
> People have always been getting older.
More people are getting older now than before. And there are fewer young people (as a percentage).
People have always been getting older, and people have always been sure that we are in the middle of a surge in crime rates. Unlike the vibecession, the vibe crime wave is a permanent phenomenon.
I am loving this entire series and the theories spinning out of it. Is it possible crime and disorder are just the Next Problem?
People in Bangladesh still gladly take jobs at sweatshops that have been known to have many deaths, not because they are unaware or unafraid of death, but because this risk is background noise for their current set of risks and problems. Meanwhile a suburban retiree I know spent two years being angry and lobbying the city to restrict traffic on his already quiet street because he was convinced everyone was speeding. To put it bluntly, the people in Bangladesh have other problems to worry about and the suburban retiree does not. People today have fewer problems and more comfortable lives than people 50 years ago - but while their ability to get entertainment on demand is up 1000%, crime and disorder are only down 20%. They now have both the time and mental space to worry about this.
This is the reality of economic growth also: if productivity is good in one area, but doesn’t improve relative to other sectors, that sector will increasingly feel expensive and burdensome.
This mirrors my thinking about this. The benchmark/expectation for social order and comfort is just wayyy higher because we live in a situation of unbelievable comfort and affluence by the standards of the vast majority of humanity in the past and many in the present.
People today have fewer problems... depends on where you live, skinny. I hear we have these things called Wild Boar these days, and that you don't actually stop them without a gun... I drive through rural Appalachia, and they post on pharmacies "no opoids here."
Yes. For example the actual filth of America's city streets is objectively much lower than the historic comparison of the same city with horse-based travel, limited indoor plumbing, limited garbage collection, and almost no social or legal prohibition on littering. But now I see one pile of dog poop or McDonald's bag thrown out a car window and I am furious, because my expectations have been elevated. And I can go to very specific parts of Europe or Asia and see that it is possible to put all trash in the right place, and I don't have to go to other places so I can disregard counter-examples.
It's also an inequality story, combined with America's unusual combination of class views. We have the wealthiest people ever to exist living in SF and NYC directly adjacent to smelly guys who don't even own a tent and whose daily routine consists of shoplifting deodorant to sell so they can buy drugs. In many prior states of the world, the wealthy individuals might address similar scenarios with one of the following coping strategies:
a) My, this city is chaotic and filthy! I shall retire to my vast country estate and put it out of mind.
b) Of course the poor are disgusting, but that is merely one of the many ways in which they are inferior to me. I shall instruct my servants to kick them until they relocate somewhere out of my line of sight (to some nightmarish asylum or gaol if need be) and then meditate on how I deserve the finest things due to a combination of unique talent, hard work, and God's favor.
c) The plight of these downtrodden individuals is a shame and an injustice! As an early altruist who lacks a global frame of reference, let me grab the low-hanging fruit of building this city's first public hospital, shelter or soup kitchen and actually improving their material condition in a way that is immediately visible and gives me warm feelings.
None of these coping strategies is available to anywhere near the same degree to today's wealthy urbanites. This experience is frustrating and gets converted into complaining about crime and disorder. It's not because there's measurably more countable bad stuff than 1990, but because the contrast sticks out more and it's clear that there's not a viable path to avoid it or manage down to a comfortable level.
> This experience is frustrating and gets converted into complaining about crime and disorder. It's not because there's measurably more countable bad stuff than 1990, but because the contrast sticks out more and it's clear that there's not a viable path to avoid it or manage down to a comfortable level.
Wait, I was following you right up until here.
Why ISN'T there a viable path to avoid it or manage it down, when most of the rest of the world manages this seemingly impossible task handily, with much lower productivity and GDP per capita than any American city?
Isn't that what most of this debate is about? One side thinks it should be possible, points to the rest of the world, and says "well?" And then the other side tries to handwave and say it's obviously impossible, because...something something culture war stuff?
And now Scott is coming in and is like "actually you're BOTH wrong! It's not even a problem! The homeless tent cities, the syringes and crap on the streets, everything being locked up in stores? All fake! That's why it's impossible, it's not even a problem! You guys are just a bunch of ungrateful whiners, enjoy your rigorously measured and verified lower crime!"
But in real life, the rest of the world still exists, and stands as a huge contrast to every Tier 1 US city, at much lower GDP per capita values. This is a problem that is eminently solvable by SOMEBODY, just not the current people in charge.
My own personal conceit?
We should give the "problem homeless" all the free drugs, alcohol, and food and water they want, out in the middle of nowhere away from all the productive people.
If you do the math, any one of the increase in core downtown usability / values, lower policing need, or lower resulting crime would pay for the entire program several times over, and the combined benefit is 4-20x larger annually than the projected costs.
I wrote about that here:
https://performativebafflement.substack.com/p/an-incentives-based-problem-homeless
Will it ever happen? Probably not, because it involves giving homeless people free drugs, and apparently neither side can abide that idea, and prefer the tent cities, syringes, and human crap everywhere.
But a man can dream!
If you're pointing at other countries that have apparently solved the problem wouldn't it make more sense to also copy their solutions and institutions rater than going with a politically impossible idea?
I mean, I'll do you one better, I'm actually an expat who fled one of our tent city pleasure domes for more functional East Asian cities.
I bring up the politically impossible idea, because part of what people claim for American Exceptionalism, and a very clear root cause of all the problems, IS the problem homeless population. Other cities supposedly don't have to deal with them, and so any American solution needs be sui generis, and it would solve that problem while being hugely net positive economically, socially, and also for the homeless people in the sense they would happily opt into it.
I’m with you completely, would also vote for less nice solutions. However there is no political will to do any of this at the state, local or federal level. The block of voters paying closest attention is against things like clearing tents off busy public streets. Another big contingent is against spending any money on homeless people even if the program is net profitable vs status quo. Another big contingent thinks there is no problem. Another big contingent thinks the problem is entirely about race or immigration and can’t see all the white native-born fent zombies. Just totally hopeless to make large progress as an individual who observes reality and proposes pragmatic solutions. Therefore people get very frustrated.
I think there's abundant political will; it's just that it's roughly evenly split between two approaches that conflict, and so their advocates spend most of that will on obstructing the opposition.
It could be that there's a growing third approach that despairs of the first two and has chosen apathy, but I don't think we're set up to accurately tell how big it is.
Yeah one of my hypotheses is that people are getting "softer" faster than they're actually getting soft. I wonder how wartorn immigrants perception compare to natives.
In the UK at least, I think it's partly that people are talking about different things when they mean crime and that certain "new" crimes have increased, and are also unpunished.
Shoplifting in London has *doubled* and it's partly a very specific method where gangs go in, take a bunch of things and then walk out. Staff are instructed not to stop them.
Phone snatch theft is way up.
These are crimes that basically didn't exist in 2010. We just don't notice that mugging or subtle shoplifting has fallen.
It's this feeling of criminals acting with impunity that really contributes to the overall decay feeling. Similarly there was a lot of outrage over an increase in people barging through ticket barriers on the London Underground. Maybe fare evasion hasn't changed, but the methods have.
(Sources in my comment yesterday: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/record-low-crime-rates-are-real-not/comment/216382569?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=15zz9)
My impression as an American is that crime in the UK peaked in the late 20th Century. For example, I went on a business trip to a leafy suburb of Oxford in 1994, where my fellow marketing researchers spent the entire lunch hour recounting how their cars had been stolen.
Many crimes have got a lot harder. Cars are harder to break into and drive away (unless you have the right tech). Lots of CC TV, door cameras etc. So there's less opportunity for casual crime: it now requires preparation.
On the other hand (in the UK anyway) the expectation that any wrongdoer may be carrying a knife means you're very unlikely to get challenged.
So crime is more brazen and this may be what people notice.
This is correct: you visited around the historic peak of car theft in the UK. Levels are now about ten times lower.
You are correct re: shoplifting, I also feel like there's been a huge move towards smaller versions of supermarkets, which are not as easy to defend as big supermarkets and the owners don't care as much as they would their own corner-shop.
Something is being overlooked here. An unpleasant environment is being detected by people who live in the United States, but it is not exactly "disorder" in the sense above.
Rather, due to mass immigration of various peoples from foreign cultures, the (usually white) Americans who had previously lived in places where even the disorder was at least in expected forms to them now often move around in neighborhoods that, though maybe more orderly than before, are "ordered differently" according to the mores of a different people. This is understood/recieved as disorder by those who are accustomed to pre-mass-immigration American society.
The "disorder" that people are complaining about is the presence of large communities of people with very different cultures next to each other. A multitude of languages and customs in areas with massive populations of very different origins is not as measurable as litter or graffiti, but may be even more unpleasant as one cannot sympathize as easily with the source of the disorder, even if they're not doing anything particularly disorderly at the moment.
Also, when people talk about the character of a neighborhood as a proxy for its ethno-racial composition, I think this is what they are experiencing.
The most vicious crime in the U.S. tends to be committed by African-Americans whose ancestors have been in America for 300 years.
Nobody, left or right, wants to admit this.
Rightwingers prefer to blame immigrants who tend to keep their heads down.
Ok... the above comment is not about crime though, or even disorder as it is normally understood. What I am saying is that the very presence of large communities of immigrants with foreign customs in cities is what causes white Americans to perceive an increase in disorder. I am not saying that immigrants are the main cause of crime or even that immigrants cause "objective" disorder (like littering, graffiti, and shoplifting listed by Scott).
Then why are the complaints about crime and disorder and not the presence of foreign cultures? I mean, people do complain about foreign cultures but why does it also cause them to complain about crime and "objective" disorder when those have not increased?
This is for the reason described in Scott's third paragraph. People do not, at least in many social spheres, complain about foreign cultures insofar as they are foreign.
The social project to make "racism" the worst crime you could commit (for certain definitions of racism) was *fantastically* successful.
Very few people, outside of a few protected sectors of academia, think crime is actually good. So if you're bothered by your culture changing (and you're the only group where it's not socially acceptable to directly complain about your culture changing), you resort to calling it crime and disorder instead.
I don't really consider that an excuse. If you're too much of a coward to just say the true thing, then keep your mouth shut. Don't be a lying snake.
Think of it les on an individual level and more on a "society in aggregate level". Consider the margin, people who absent a pressure would be marginal over whether to "say it as it is" or to "euphemistically lie". Now place moderate to high pressure on the societal norms in that culture that "say it as it is" gets socially punished and "euphemistically lie" does not.
You're going to push people over the margin.
The higher the pressure, the more get pushed over that margin. Perhaps enough (perhaps easily enough) to explain the effect of "I'm seeing a lot more complaints about 'crime and disorder' than I used to even though crime has gone down and disorder seems stable".
You can blame any given individual for lying rather than keeping their mouth shut.... but you can't expect hundreds of millions of people not to respond to incentives. They're always going to move people at those margins in bulk in a way that is "understandable in aggregate, if not really forgivable individually". For the bulk of those people they wouldn't even really see it as lying so much as "expressing my concerns in a way that conforms to the way my society prefers those concerns to be expressed".
Because people have scruples against assigning blame in unfair ways?
Yes, but I'm not sure why you're glossing over the fact that increased racial integration would cause the exact same phenomenon.
If you mean homogenously mixed communities, the mores do not come into play here because they require interactions. If you are referring to the Great Migration of African-Americans, the issue there was not mores but actual crime. African-Americans have some distinct customs and attitudes in comparison with other Americans but far less so than, say, Indians, who contribute to society quite admirably, but make it take on the character of *their* society rather than the American society of the period before mass immigration.
What's your policy proposal?
If Steve Sailer were king, what would he do about this?
I don't know the statistics on this, so you could be right on the facts (however we want to define "vicious crimes"). But your comment seems to hint at policy which I think is unethical and racist. At least it doesn't sound like it's gonna be "better education". So I second Nadav's question: What do you propose?
We've had three periods in my lifetime in which liberals held the upper hand in criminal justice policy: the Warren Court Era, the Ferguson Effect, and the Floyd Effect. All three led to explosions in crime, especially black on black murder.
So, first thing: Let's learn from that unfortunate experience and Not Do It Again.
Second thing: We've seen New York City radically reduce its murder rate by focusing on point-of-use gun control to change the culture of criminals: make lowlifes more afraid of the cops than of each other, so they leave their illegal hand guns at home.
It shouldn't be that hard to learn from the world's most famous city.
Also, this kind of discussion feels strange to me: "Which group of people commits the worst crimes?" Like, the group "gang members" is surely high up on that list, but that's not helpful. If you determine currently arriving immigrants from a particular country commits notably more crimes (and that's all you care about), I suppose you could "solve" the issue by restricting immigration from that country. But what do you do about a group, any group, of citizens who commit a lot of crimes? And how do you determine which groups are relevant? We know young men commit disproportionately many crimes, for instance, and thats a population thats not going to disappear, ever. And if you start going by a groups ethnic origin, you land in very dark eugenicsy waters very quickly. Unless genetics has nothing to do with it, in which case you're back to the general question of what causes crime and how to adress that, which I think is the sensible question to ask and to guide policy for everyone.
Most people still favor American Eugenics laws. do you not, sir? If not, will you advocate for a retard, unable to understand how sex makes babies, having and attempting to care for her child?
Deporting illegal immigrants can have some good effects, but it won't have much affect on America's notoriously high gun homicide rate, which is largely due to African-Americans whose ancestors have been here on average about ten generations.
It's not widely understood how much lower the Hispanic homicide death rate is than the black death rate -- Latinos die about 22% as often by homicides as African Americans, even though Latinos and blacks are roughly comparable in income and education.
That blacks die by homicide 4 to 5 times as often as Hispanics, 10 times as often as whites,, and 16 times as often as Asians, suggests there is something very wrong with African-American culture and that blacks ought to do something about their culture.
But that's not a conversation many people want to have.
African immigrants (not including Somalians) tend to have rather different culture. One might hope for Garett Jones' "spaghetti assimilation" to occur by which they transmit their less homicidal culture, but I don't know that there's any evidence for that.
It's an important question, but there are methodological problems with using self-identification for figuring out the trajectory of the next generation of immigrants from Africa. For example, say there are two 19 year old fraternal twin brothers. The one who self-identifies as an Ibo is more likely to be a Pre-Med. The one who self-identifies as Black is more likely to be an Aspiring Rapper.
Once you see this, you can't unsee it. Rightists will talk about the horror of diversity, the decline of America's white majority, the "third-worlding of America" and all the examples involve pre-65 American blacks. In addition to the falsity of it, it's politically shortsighted. The Sikh laundry-owner who minds his own business and doesn't like crime, LGBT-stuff in schools, etc is made into an enemy while GOP attempts to appeal to blacks mostly fail.
Deporting illegal aliens would reduce littering, drunk driving, and similar quality of life problems. But it wouldn't have much effect on America's high murder rate, which is majority black.
Vancouver, BC has a very large number of people from Hong Kong on the streets and I’ve never heard a single person complain about this other than worry that it’s driving up house prices.
My dad remembers a lot of anti-Asian and anti-Indian racism in Vancouver back in the early 80s
Bad Cattitude has an article about Second World that's worth reading. You aren't getting Somali "culture" when you get a Somali rapist here. Or a Turkish rapist. Muslim countries generally punish rape quite harshly).
What you're getting is new immigrants convinced they're the top dog because you're too weak to tell them no. Committing crimes, not of passion, but of primacy. Because that's how their culture works, when they're top dog (which they ain't at home).
I suspect there's a lot of truth to this -- any sort of culture shock situation is emotionally threatening because there's the risk of social interactions going awry. In the US in recent years, other than dealing with the truly insane, there is little risk of petty social problems being dangerous, but you don't have to go very far into the past when people were killed due to social conflicts. I doubt that people perceive the fish-out-of-water sensation as being directly dangerous, but I expect that it raises some sort of baseline anxiety level that causes anything that is potentially dangerous to seem more so.
> When people complain about these things, they risk getting called a racist
I don’t see how complaining about these things is racist, unless you also explicitly bring up the race of the people involved while complaining and open yourself up to accusations that way. Indeed, if someone else associates these complaints with race when you made no reference to it, ISTM that says something about their own biases. Is this maybe a US cultural thing of some sort I am missing?
African-Americans die by homicide an order of magnitude more than white-Americans, 15 to 20 times as often as Asian Americans, and 4 to 5 times as often as Hispanic-Americans.
Few know this.
It's considered racist to know this.
…but Scott doesn’t mention any of those races in that statement! He doesn’t even mention homicide:
“Disorder takes many forms, but its symptoms include litter, graffiti, shoplifting, tent cities, weird homeless people wandering about muttering to themselves, and people walking around with giant boom boxes shamelessly playing music at 200 decibels on a main street where people are trying to engage in normal activities. When people complain about these things…”
There’s a leap being made that is not justified by the text. Which is where I came in.
it's entirely justified, as multiple comments have said. Guess I need to add another one. In America, when you complain about urban disorder, people call you racist. Source: I live in this country.
"It's considered racist to know this."
Citation needed. I know this and nobody has ever called me a racist for it. Maybe people are calling you a racist for other things you're saying.
It’s a US Cultural thing. Complaining about crime has been called by prominent Democrats as a dog whistle for racism. “Law and Order” has been considered a racist dog whistle Nixon used it in the 1960s. https://www.salon.com/2017/03/03/sessions-scandal-exposes-the-hypocrisy-of-trumps-dog-whistle-call-for-law-and-order/#:~:text=What’s%20important%20to%20understand%20is%20that%20using%20the,that%20was%20becoming%20stigmatized%20in%20the%20late%201960s.
Since then more and more things have been considered dog whistles.
Ana Kasparian's "how I left the left" story prominently features an incident where she got sexually assaulted by a homeless man, and when she complained about it to her friends afterwards they called her a racist, even though she had not mentioned his race and in fact the man was white. You can try to pull the reverse-Uno card of calling people like this racist in turn, but it rarely works.
Where do you live? In most countries I'm familiar with the people behaving anti-socially tend to be minorities.
What happens is that people are uncomfortable with this fact so a taboo forms around talking about it. The way this taboo is enforced is by accusing people who breach it of bigotry.
The larger the gap is between observable reality and what you're allowed to say in polite company the stronger this taboo must necessarily be. In the United States it's exceptionally strong so people are easily provoked into accusations of racism.
I would suggest that antisocial behavior by the majority is done under color of law (e.g. masked agents invading Minneapolis) and not characterized as antisocial. If one does characterize majority behavior as antisocial, they are dismissed as a radical to maintain the illusion that antisocial behavior is a characteristic of minority groups of various kinds.
I was just using that phrase to refer to what Scott referred to as "disorder". Stuff like littering or playing music loudly on a bus.
Krischstallnacht was hardly done under the color of the law. Neither was the latest episode of driving around in Tanks in South Africa. Now, you might say the brownies in the tanks aren't "the majority" because they aren't black... but the rioters were hardly under the color of the law either.
Is it possible that your understanding is colored by the First World?
Because burning down the government in Sri Lanka was also done by the majority....
My word! The list goes on...
My comments re: SF shoplifting experience as one of the rare ACX readers who bags groceries for a living are already on file in previous posts. So I'll just add confirmation that, yes, at my store location we still see increased shoplifting compared to The Before Times. It's just an ordinary part of the workday now, no more remarkable than getting Karened or bitched at for meat shortages we have no control over. But, and this is important: prevented shoplifting is definitely not something we report! Some employees just have a well-developed knack for spotting Problem Customers, and it's actually fairly likely boosters will relinquish their ten-finger discount if politely called out on it. (More likely if done impolitely, but we're not supposed to do that, and the people responsible have been fired. You learn the plausibly-deniable ways from seeing who gets scapegoated.) This is a notable improvement from a few years ago, where theft was significantly more brazen, and you ran a real risk of A Viral Confrontation by attempting any intervention. So rates are elevated, but still down, but down less than they appear because deterrence is a bit more effective. I don't know *why* this changed though... (Prop 36, which Scott hosted a guest post oppposing?)
And even a successfully stopped shoplifting attempt will probably have some witnesses, who may still consider it evidence of disorder, although hopefully less than getting away with it. It'd be very interesting to dive into the effectiveness of such criminality over time too: when boosters are highly competent and no one's the wiser except the accountants, the perception of disorder could actually be quite low, since no one ever sees the thefts happening! I do think this must be part of the story, since the viral spread of shoplifting-as-normative necessarily resulted in many new entrants who lacked the skills of veterans who'd quietly been doing it for years. Kids these days got no technique...but that doesn't much matter if you can't stop them anyway, which describes many of the most outrageous retail thefts. Why bother with gambits like The Service Animal Distraction, Jacket Draped Over Cart, Bag Brought From Home, Dress Like A Dangerous Professional, etc when you can just load up a Hefty 50gal and walk out unimpeded?
I should also add that we experimented for awhile with simply not carrying certain high-value items that walked off often (e.g. cosmetics, fancier liquor, bougie meats). While this does mechanically deter theft of those specific SKUs...it's not like there aren't other valuable things to steal. Strategies shift, fencing markets adjust, they'll resell Milagro instead of Tito's or whatever. Obviously as a mere grunt I don't have access to hard figures, but our most recent disappointing inventory audit disproved the thesis that high-value-item shrinkage was the main driver of our discrepancies. This implies that it's more of a "make it up in volume" type situation. We can ban repeat offenders, occasionally get the actual cops involved for the most serious incidents, reduce the maximum possible conversion rate...but as long as there's a steady trickle of New Challengers, it's gonna keep being an uphill battle. It seems genuinely hard, or at least uncomfortably expensive, to put this toothpaste back in the tube. (And yes, for the record, I'm willing to bite such bullets. This shit makes my job harder, it makes things worse for our customers, and frankly the median perp is simply not a Jean Valjean-esque sympathy case. Although I don't think the death penalty is quite appropriate, contra Scott's boombox stance.)
Thanks.
Thanks for sharing, curious if you can say more about this:
> You learn the plausibly-deniable ways
Physical contact is a huge no-no, that's a one-way ticket to a disciplinary writeup at minimum. But, you know, sometimes the escalator randomly shuts off when someone's trying to flee up it, and that's really weird. Or cart wheels lock up at inopportune times. We also can't directly blockade exits (like stand in front of the doors) or chase people, but sometimes you just get in the mood to take a walk outside alongside a shoplifter, you know? Get some fresh air, practice those customer service skills.
The verbal interactions have to be careful as well...we're not supposed to be directly accusatory (unless it happens right in front of our eyes), so oftentimes it's more of a Common Knowledge thing. Making them aware that you're aware that they're stealing, and you're aware of their awareness of your awareness, etc. Then it's just a matter of going up and being like, hey man, not today, yeah? Or like, hey buddy, can I get you a basket, you seem to need some help carrying a few extra items there.
It's also occasionally possible to take advantage of police presence if they just happen to be in the area for something else (or even shopping). We don't have to intimate that we called them, just note the proximity. Similarly, when it's a repeat offender (and we're very certain of that, can't afford false positives), usually the best resolution is to ask them to leave before they even attempt to steal anything, tell them they're banned. For whatever reason, there's less legal and cultural pushback to the "shopkeepers reserve the right to refuse service to anyone" thing compared to shoplifting dynamics, and if they refuse to comply then it's very easy for us to escalate to real law enforcement. Oftentimes the frustrated aspiring criminal then goes on to beclown themself in a way that further retroactively justifies kicking them out!
On a meta level, since it's SF, it's also of course highly important to hedge against any accusations of _____isms. This is one valuable aspect of having a diverse workforce, especially at the managerial level...avoiding the perception of bias is much easier if the interaction is same-race, same-sex, similar-age, and so on. Also disarms any potential defenses from the perp along the lines of Help I'm Being Oppressed.
Just by itself this comment may directly answer the sub-question "If shoplifting is flat/modestly down/modestly up, why are people citing increased shoplifting as strong evidence of increased disorder".
If the shoplifting in question changes from "Mr Pro Lifter" who steals $500 of stuff a week for years and years without ever being detected by the shop *or the general public* when doing so..... to "Mr Brazen Gang Lifter" who steals $4-5-600 of stuff a week with one big fat raid where him and his mates scoops a load of stuff off the shelves and brazenly walk out past dozens of scared shoppers and ineffectual shop security.
I think Mr Pro-Lifter doesn't alter perceptions of disorder at all.... and Mr Brazen gang Lifter if going to get thousands of employees/shoppers (over the years they operate) reporting "Disorder is off the charts, just the other day I saw....."
It could just be a change of tactics.
"Shrinkage" includes lots of avenues of loss that would not be perceived as disorder (as they are discreet) ... if "shrinkage" has switched from discreet strategies (employees pocketing items, Mr Pro Lifter) to highly public strategies (dozen person brazen raids and walkouts) you'd expect the same amount of shrinkage to lead to a widely reported increase in disorder from the thousands of people who witness the brazen raids.
I have a suspicion that what changed compared to even twenty years ago is the rise of a powerful ideological block that is loudly against cracking down on disorder. When everyone agrees that miscreants should be dealt with but disorder still happens, that codes as an unfortunate fact of life or simple government incompetence. But when there are people, who hold the greatest influence in America's biggest and most culturally influential cities, and genuinely believe that dealing with disorder and petty crime is not worth putting people in jail/ clearing encampments/ throwing the homeless out of public transportation or libraries, then it feels like disorder is a choice actively pursued by those in charge, which is much more infuriating.
There's something incredibly cruel about the position that, if you can no longer afford rent, the government should also seize your library card, or rip down the tent you've put up in a desperate attempt at shelter.
We don't have other forms of free entertainment! Everything else either requires a home or is paywalled.
Well, those are closed during the day, actually. Which is when the library is open.
The shelters won't take them, you have no experience with shelters I take it? They have complex entrance rules to include often "you have to prove you are homeless, have been for awhile, and a recent TB test .. oh and nobody with a criminal record". Takes three days just to get the PPD test read.
You are 100% wrong man, up until two years ago, I spent five years as a case manager in an emergency homeless shelter. We rejected maybe 90% of people that showed up initially and in nearly every case, because our cost reimbursable government contract required it. And then once you were in the shelter, we kicked people out all the time with with a one week "go sleep on the street" waiting period to re-apply. To get in a shelter there is a generally a thirty minute interview which covers everything from ID's to medical history to criminal background checks to immigration status to verification of your story including tracking down references that can collaborate it. And if you didn't have a proof of PPD within the past three months, well too bad so sad, stop by our nurse's office and she'll give you one and maybe we'll let you in in three days if you come back and we can read it; enjoy sleeping on the street with your kids until then.
And no this wasn't "just my shelter", we ran 95% of the shelters in the entire state and the other ones had the same policies as they were all mandated by state grant requirements.
The only "free for all" shelter in the state was ran by a farmer who would put you up in large military surplus tent with every one else, a tatami mat for the ground to sleep on with a bedbug ridden blanket, and some cold rice to eat where every one would get kicked out at sunrise and could re-enter at sunset. And almost no one went because it was far away hence transportation issues plus honestly you were better off in a box in an alley closer to all the social service support networks like homeless showers, libraries to get out of environment, soup trucks, etc.
The public has this magic fantasy of what the homeless programs their taxes pay for look like, they look nothing like you imagine and they are generally funding to reject people in need and instead provide make work jobs for social workers while allowing politicians to claim "they did something".
When people talk about homeless people in libraries, they obviously don't mean you should literally have to prove you have a roof over your head before you're allowed inside. The question is whether people should be allowed to sleep in libraries, consume drugs in them, and whether there should be minimum hygiene standards.
It's not 1998, public neighborhood libraries haven't been about children since home Internet and smart phones have became the norm for even poor people. Urban libraries for the last twenty years have been de facto daytime homeless community centers and it's the only thing that keeps them in business as every one else just uses the Internet, uses the libraries e-Book program, or uses the central research libraries which don't attract homeless people as they intentionally don't provide services homeless want like Internet access, multimedia, magazines, comfortable reading areas, pop fiction, and they strictly enforce STFU or get kicked out policies, etc .. the same reason you you don't kids there either.
This ain't Mayberry, if it weren't for the homeless we would shudder 99% of urban libraries and then you all would cry "why do we have all these homeless on the street" rather than hiding away in libraries you never visit anyways.
Alright, you've convinced me. Lets shut down the libraries. But what do we do with the buildings...?
Nothing, just leave them as is and let them continue as politically acceptable faux homeless community centers. If we turned them into "proper" designed shelters, the homeless wouldn't go there as homeless shelters are generally hostile to the homeless. Libraries are a win win, the homeless want to be there (safety, clean, shelter, internet) AND the librarians want to keep their jobs so both parties have an interest in keeping them useful. I'd probably reallocate some of the actual book budget though to the central / research libraries while increasing the library janitorial staff and bathroom facilities.
Yeah I don't want to pay taxes for that lol
Banned for this comment.
(started: "Theyre not using the library for free entertainment, you silly little bitchboy2000.")
>if you can no longer afford rent
Why can they no longer afford rent? Liberals will tell us (correctly) that there are many jobs that Americans don't want to do, and we need immigration. Do they see the contradiction between that and these kinds of beliefs?
Because you can't hold down a job, effectively you are socially disabled for lack of a better word. Also it tends to be a downward spiral, I take it you haven't rented much lately. You lose your job so you get evicted, you end up homeless, and then you cant' get a job because you are homeless and don't have an address. If you do manage to get an address, you then can't rent a place because you have no credit, your record shows you were eviction, the court has ordered 25% your pay taken as restitution should you get a job to pay off that old eviction, and no landlord is interesting in dealing with you outside predatory slumlords who are doing to charge you more than you can afford for places that are effectively inhabitable but the city, like most municipalities, has no interested in applying building codes and landlord tenant law against landlords.
If your take home is $600 a month full time minimum wage and even the cheapest dump in your city is $900, not even counting food, utilities, transportation costs to work, etc on top of the court taking, you see the problem?
> If you do manage to get an address, you then can't rent a place because you have no credit
How did this system arise? For most of human history you didn't need "credit" to rent a place, now you do. Could it have anything to do with regulations liberals put in place that made landlords reluctant to rent to the poor?
Sure a lot of this can be blamed on Progressive policies such a landlord liability for tenant actions and a duty to know your tenants but likewise Conservative WASP values are at fault as well; zoning and building codes a big problem too. But we can't blame this one on credit scores, as a lender you don't want people that are proven unreliable. The reason credit scores are even a "problem" in rental context is simply because we have a lack of supply hence landlords can afford to be overly picky.
Going back to a Substack discourse from a few months ago (or is it still burning off my feed?), let's say a homeless person exposes himself at the library. What do people expect would have happened 50 years ago? Would the good old boys beat him to death? Or would the cops do it first? What do people expect now? That you just have to helplessly avert your eyes or shuffle your kids out of the building hoping they didn't see? Whether either scenario was/is truly realistic, that's how some people have evidently come to feel about it. Even if this kind of thing happens statistically less often today than 50 years ago, perceived helplessness about it will drive more fear of it.
I doubt the cops would "beat him to death", but they'd probably show up and drag him out (possibly somewhat roughing him up in the process).
You lost me on this post. So many weird assumptions based on … nothing? ignorance? bias?
Your views about the pre-1950s eras for example seem culled from sheer imagination. How old are you?
And… “boom boxes”? That’s what’s worrying you these days?
What were the weird assumptions?
(regarding boom boxes scott is just extremely sensitive to noise see https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/misophonia-beyond-sensory-sensitivity?utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app&triedRedirect=true )
To be fair, that's a number one annoyance for many people. Out enjoy the beach, here come Tyrone to ruin it. Out taking a ten mile hike up a mountain, here come Nyguen to ruin it. Trying to sit on the bus and read, here comes Paco to ruin it.
It's kind of weird that you felt the need to use strongly racially-coded names, but you spread it around a little, presumably to defuse accusations of racism. Apologies if I'm reading too much into this.
No, it was intentional. It's not something American white people do in my observation, we are raised better than that. I can earnestly say I run into it multiple times a day for nearly two decades and not a single instance in all the time of a white person being the culprit.
Yeah he should have at least asked an AI if there were any complaints about homelessness or public disorder in the 1930s, and he would have found out about Hoovervilles and slum clearances and other famous transformations of urban areas during that period!
Producing obnoxious noise is a way to assert dominance in a public space. It signals the assumed ability to inflict inconvenience on others without fear of consequences. This is not about noise per se, it is about social hierarchy. So it’s a big deal.
Bingo
Secular comparisons are interesting but there’s no reason why they should be a decisive metric. Crime and disorder can decrease. They are bad. In Chicago they affect everyone in the sense that there are vast areas no one feels safe in (or would feel safe in if visited). I do wonder when/where people have said “Crime is not a problem.)
No reason they should be decisive - but the issue isn’t whether people say “crime is not a problem” so much as when people are saying “crime is a more important problem than X” or “crime is a less important problem than Y”. If crime is decreasing and some other problem is increasing, but people are focusing more on crime and less on the other problem, then that should be fixed.
Your point is true to some extent but neglects the appropriate utility weighting of crime. Is there evidence that subjective utility weightings overestimate what would be best? I
Theory five: it's the media.
The traditional news media has a direct financial interest in upsetting people. Social media has an indirect financial interest in upsetting people. And blogs like this one are dominated by people like us, who are easy to upset with objectively harmless things like public boom boxes.
It's probably a combination of several of the theories, but agree that the media/internet/culture wars seems to be missing in the conversation here.
Media has a well documented negativity bias.
Conservative politics has a "liberal cities are all overrun with chaos and crime" vibe that fits their politics and worldview and is incentivized to amplify.
Internet culture/tools allow for quicker cycling of rumors/negative anecdotes than the past, in the 50s someone told a handful of their neighbors about how they heard there were tent cities everywhere, now they can spread that on Facebook/reddit/wherever to a much larger audience.
Anecdotally I will say there was a clear bump in disorderliness here in Minneapolis in the post COVID/post George Floyd era, that has since
I think he purposefully leave this out because it's so obvious. So he's trying to find all other possible explanations before we can throw our hands and say, it's the media.
Well, when it comes to SF, I don't think you should go by the old, native population's opinion at all. Nor do I think everyone is able to distinguish well between 'lived experience' and youtube.
As someone who grew up in the Bay in 60s/70s, lived in Berkeley and SF in the 80s and 90s, and still spends much of the year there, I can assure you much of SF angst - about crime, disorder and everything else - is less a function of objective than relative decline.
The City of my youth was comparable, in many ways, only to NY. Banks, stock exchange, food/art, international culture Back then, even a 'trip to Chicago' was supposedly a trudge. San Franciscans believed it lacked restaurants and scoffed at its 'continental cuisine' and rustic ways. We were quite convinced 40 years ago there was basically little of interest in the US until you got to NYC, and, yes!, we were actually more sophisticated than New Yorker because we were somehow more European! (Funny to remember just how Europhile SF was. Even the 60s counterculture owed a lot to posh talking, pipe smoking, obviously upper class Alan Watts). Well the rest of the country caught up
Even more importantly, the rest of the bay is where the regional improvement has occurred. Places like Walnut Creek, and much of the peninsula are vastly more pleasant and interesting than they were before. If you imagine most of those people in SF everyday for work you'd have a different downtown. As it is, who needs to go downtown? I would argue its not who is there now (criminals, loiterers, drug addicts) but who isn't that makes the difference. Most of us go looking for affirmation in our daily routine as much as we do online.
Aren't ~1933-1970 the years when it was time for people born at Prohibition to commit crimes? (Wild thought, doesn't seem to be confirmed by Russian statistics, but idk, maybe there is something here)
This, and the immigration post, don't come close to doing justice to how misleading the appeal to government statistics is in some circumstances.
An autistic boy dropped a Quran in UK. The was then bullied out of school, the was sent into hiding from death threats, and the boy himself was investigated by the authorities for a hate crime. The parents tried begging forgiveness from the community with the mother wearing a hijab, while the community leaders sympathized with the attackers as an understandable reaction.
This is to say nothing of the increasingly common mass shooting (Bondi, Manchester), another that could have been the biggest one in history was stopped recently in the UK.
So statistics about violent crime don't mean jackfruit to the child in a largely Muslim school, someone wearing a kippa in public, or someone who criticizes the religion.
Where can I read about this Quran-dropping and subsequent society-wife upheaval?
Google "Wakefield Quran" and the info will turn up
I googled it, and apart from brief news reports and speculation, I found one in-depth story about it (maybe more in later results pages):
https://www.newstatesman.com/the-weekend-report/2023/03/inside-wakefield-koran-incident
Is this story accurate? You have to read to the end to get a sense of what it's saying. The writing comes across as tendentious at first, and the author clearly has opinions, but if the facts are as reported, then it seems like your characterization is way off base. I'm speaking as someone who readily accepts that Islam tends to be regressive, and a big problem for Western societies.
This article is a masterclass in admitting the truth, while trying to frame it softly to lull people into complacency. The article fully admits that that a teacher was forced into hiding for showing a picture; that the origin of the mobs against the kids was from within the UK including from a Labor politician; the school suspended the kids as a result of the mobs whipped up for the kid's own safety (weasel sentence of saying that the suspension wasn't "from the *mosque's* demand" as if it wasn't coerced); acknowledges that the school couldn't host the meeting for "safeguarding reasons", and on and on.
The article tries to soothe you that it was actually the school's fault for trying to appease by calling an assembly where they said that the students were suspended for doing "awful things" to the book, which was "inflammatory"! Apparently the people threatening violence had no agency. Even in the meeting, the defense was that it didn't tear, not that violence against blasphemers is wrong, the imam who ran the meeting was pretty clear about that.
So as far as I can tell, the central point I made is correct, and that in the UK you can already have mobs whipped up at you for being accused of blasphemy. Disproving a peripheral claim I didn't make, such as whether or not there were women at the meeting, is insignificant.
>The 1930s - 1960s were a local minimum in crime and disorder of all types.
This graph is perfect, I always had the impression that all this sentiment is about nostalgia for a short golden age, not for a general historic norm. The 19th century was not more orderly than the 21st.
Moldbug back then asked, how many places could you go on "on foot and about", during the night, wearing a gold watch, safely in 1950 and in 2008? And the answer is that in 2008 fewer places than in 1950, but more places than in 1910.
So this single-handedly disproves the Neoreactionary idea that democracies just keep governing worse and worse.
Maybe just more old people now. And old people like to complain about everything.
>What caused this local minimum in crime? Claude suggests a combination of low Depression-era birth rates (small cohort of adolescents in peak crime years), the wartime economy and postwar economic boom, high psychiatric institutionalization rates, and “cultural and social cohesion” in the wake of WWII - but none of these explain why the trend should start in 1933, nor reach then-record lows by 1939. Nor does it explain why we should update so strongly on this unique period that we still feel cheated sixty years later when things aren’t quite as good.
I think the drop is downstream from wealth inequality and the US government making serious efforts to tackle it. FDR was a big deal and crime usually tracks with inequality in general.
It rises again before that does, but the assassinations of the 1960s and the Vietnam War did massive damage to US social cohesion.
The '90s drop doesn't fit that pattern, but I can't help but notice the period also marked the rise of the internet and video games, making the new baseline lower - it does start rising again from the Great Recession.
Disorder may be decreasing per capita, but it is so concentrated spatially that it is probably getting more visible. And people who drive by a busy intersection and see twice the number of homeless are not going to be mentally adjusting for the increase in their city's population.
Yep. The Tenderloin 30+ years ago occupied a much larger portion of the City. Back in the early 80s, when Berkeley students still did part time jobs, I worked delivering medical beds to hospitals and people in the SROs around downtown. Much of what we would have considered 'the bad neighborhood' is now fine. Similar folk, but jammed into a smaller space. (note: there was a lot more violence there back in the day. The dregs of the underclass on opiates rather than booze, speed, or crack has made a difference. More appalling looking - because so concentrated - but much less dangerous)
I don't live in the Bay Area. In fact, I live in a rural Northeast town where nobody even locks their doors. I don't even know where my house keys are rn. But I still hear people complain about crime, though it's vaguely elsewhere or sort of lurking behind the bushes ready to jump out, immigrant pedos waiting to nab their kids, that sort of thing.
As far as I can tell, it's a media diet issue. They consume a lot of media that focuses on horrible crimes committed by the type of people they already dislike.
You are so lucky. My stories from my rural coworkers is "we look at all our high school classmates in prison" and "who shot up in the walmart this week." Times are hard, lots of rural places (and that's not counting the hawgs)
True, my town is relatively affluent and progressive, full of old hippies and arty retirees and organic farmers. A nearby island is more working class and the police blotter there has a lot of drug-related arrests. Still most of those criminals are not going around robbing strangers, so the crime is relegated to local circles that the rest of us don't have much contact with. I do recall the time the guy who was installing my new propane furnace explained that he usually brings in some "junkies" to haul away an old oil tank for free because they sell the metal. I had to tell him not to bring junkies into my house!
Lucky for you, you must not have many vacation homes near ya. Teenagers break into 'em all the time (it's relatively safe, and they don't steal much).
Well, there aren't many teenagers, so that probably helps, but yeah, burglaries are pretty rare here.
What about the possibility of comparison? Prior to YouTube et al., most urban dwellers had little idea how other cities in other countries looked like.
Nowadays everyone can see that, say, Asian or Central European metropolises look more orderly and asks quite logically "if we are so rich, why do we tolerate so much filth when Bangkok or Kyiv can maintain nice living environment with a fraction of American GDP"?
How far do we want to go down the order hole? Seems to me we can get pretty arbitrary pretty fast.
Is men walking around with beards and long hair a form of disorder? What about people wearing pajama pants in the grocery store? People wearing un-ironed, collarless shirts and no hats?
Loud music audible from cars? Music without easily distinguishable melodies? Melodies that don't stick to one major or minor key?
People using curse words outside the bar? People using bad grammar?
Brightly colored cars? Cars with iridescent paint? Cars with more than one color paint? Cars with bumper stickers on them?
Etc.
I got sick with a cold back in December, and needed the one brand of cough drops that really works (Fisherman’s Friend!), which they only have at Walgreens. I was in line behind a gentleman in very new, stylish streetwear. He didn’t speak, and didn’t understand the normal English words spoken to him by the cashier. He had some kind of bank card, and seemed to know that it had something to do with buying things, but he didn’t have any idea what to do with it. Didn’t know how to make the card and the terminal interface with each other. After a seemingly-interminable period of failed gesturing, the cashier, with an apologetic glance at me, took the guy’s card and ran it for him.
I was irritated because his ignorance unnecessarily prolonged the physical pain I was experiencing.
I wish him the best! I don’t know his story in this big beautiful melting pot of America. Sincerely, best of luck.
Two years ago, a night cleaning crew blew up our local Applebees when they accidentally cut a gas line and didn’t call emergency services because nobody on the crew spoke English. Or, you know, “language barrier” might have been code for something else, hard to know the truth in these things.
Three years ago, my friend was walking down the street. A man started following, yelling about how he was going to kill him. He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t want to do something racist, like call the police.
Six years ago, I was having brunch at an outdoor seating place. A man walked past, talking about how he was going to come back with a machine gun and spray bullets everywhere. “Just spraying”, he kept saying. “Spraying everywhere”.
They planted trees in that neighborhood. But the guys who speed down that street, engines roaring, at 3am, flattened them all. Like most of the road signs get flattened at one time or another. I actually felt the thump when one of them crashed into the retaining wall of the apartment building next door. Water spraying everywhere from the smashed hydrant.
I think you're trying to make the point that the type of disorder you are bothered by is not trivial stuff like people doing their grocery shopping in pajamas? That you have some kind of boundary around "disorder that causes material harm"? That's great.
Nothing new, it’s been like that for generations.
For example my grandparents generation grew up where there were neighborhoods for each type of recently arrived European immigrant like polish, Irish, Italian.
The kids from each group formed gangs and would go fight each other, my grandpa being Italian fought with and hated poles and Irish. Then his daughter married an into a big polish family and he softened on them.
Of course, a lot of these immigrants didn’t speak English well. I mean, maybe the Irish but that one’s still a bit iffy.
In practice you just find a few things people can agree on ("we want cleaner streets" or "we should be able to dress how we like") and focus on changing those, you don't need to decide all social norms at once or based on some underlying princeple.
Yes. Those are all examples of things that raise the perceived level of public disorder.
You don't want *zero* public disorder. But the ideal amount is less than it is in most places. I would say Shibuya is about perfect. Prague is slightly too low, maybe.
We should look to revealed preference to see how far people want to go down.
What are we looking for there, then? Is preference revealed when a person is evidently willing to live in an urban center and just constantly whine about it? Or is preference revealed once the person has removed themselves to a Stepford-Wives type subdivision with $250/mo HOA fees in which no disorder is tolerated?
"Voting with their feet" reveals preferences.
Sure, and I think sometimes that can be illuminating, but it's also a very imperfect way to judge what people really want. Voting with your feet requires you to find a new place to live, which can be a time-consuming process. Some people spend their whole lives wishing they could move and not moving, for various reasons, some of which are outside their control.
In general, people are messy and irrational, they often say they want one thing and do another, or do one thing but regret it, or hate something one day and not mind it the next day. I believe cognitive dissonance is the baseline state from which humans operate, not some kind of special failure mode.
I believe many complaints about disorder are actually just frustrated expressions of tribal identity.
It's not frictionless, but that also means when people DO move the reasons were enough to overcome such frictions. If we compare multiple places, we can see what factors are associated with net movement.
If people say one thing and do another, discount the "cheap talk".
I don't think it's that simple. You are treating people as acting rationally in their self-interest, based on sufficient and accurate information, even now with your concession that decisions are not frictionless. In reality people often do not act rationally in their self-interest and frequently do not act on good information. In other words, I don't think action contains as much information about preferences as you do.
We can discount cheap talk, but then we should also discount cheap action, and probably a good deal of expensive action as well.
I theorize that at the heart of most talk and action is expression of tribal identity.
Crime is an equilibrium outcome, depending on how people react to their perception of it. As such, it's hard to evaluate by just looking at crime statistics. A potentially large part of the cost of crime are these preventive measures, which hold down the increase in actual crime.
Silly example: suppose a town is assailed by a pack of werewolves that hunt every full moon. The townsfolk learn about this and institute a 5 pm curfew on full moon nights; everyone also installs silver locks on every entrance to their houses. These measures are very effective, fully neutralizing the werewolf threat. The reported (and actual) number of werewolf attacks is unchanged, yet everyone is worse off.
Or take a store who sees an increase in shoplifting. It puts everything behind locked doors, which push shoplifting back to it's previous trend. This would show as a short-lived spike in crime, but it would lead to higher costs to the store, and a worse experience for all customers.
If you want to properly measure the significance of crime, you need to measure trends in anti-theft devices, in police expenditure, in private security, etc. There are also more intangible actions that nevertheless reflect crime and disorder: avoiding certain neighborhoods at night, taking a cab rather than the subway, changing your walking route to avoid smelly areas of the city, moving to the suburbs to avoid rowdy encounters, etc.
Indeed. We used to have a world where just leaving your keys in your car was best practice, convenient for instance for double parking and emergency situations. Today, your friends would laugh at you, your insurance company would laugh at you, the police would laugh at you and the media would accuse you of entrapment.
Similarly, it used to be eminently reasonable to hitchhike to get from A to B, whereas now Norwegian police give public service announcements to discourage people from stopping for someone who seems to need help with a flat tire. The reasoning is that you are quite likely to get robbed and that this is the new status quo that we need to get used to.
If your numbers do not capture this enormous change in behavior, it says very little about the actual criminal environment and a lot about your misuse of statistics.
Similarly, it is worth to reflect on the occasional scandals flaring up about people contracting HIV from blood transfusions. These are not really going to show up in the statistics, as far as I can tell; the number of cases is dwarfed by the sexual transmissions in high-risk groups. Nevertheless, they give rise to moral panic, for good reasons.
There is a very meaningful difference between risks, whether related to STDs or crime, for which high-risk behaviors function as an "opt-in", as opposed to risks that you cannot avoid without becoming an eccentric recluse. If you shifted some part of the homicide burden from card carrying members of Fight Club to churchgoing grandmothers, I wouldn't hesitate to say crime had gotten worse.
The expression "play stupid games, win stupid prizes" is a shorthand for this. Crime which could be prevented by avoiding undesirable behaviors (like going to Fight Club) does not have the same moral worth as crime which pushes us to give up nice things worth having (like offering help without worrying for our personal safety).
(I am not sure if this is a significant effect and what would be the real examples.)
But we don't see short-lived spikes in crime followed by a return to a relatively flat baseline, we see a decline in crime rates over a scale of decades. So it can't only be explained by risk compensation.
The first chart on the page shows that despite the COVID spike, shoplifting rates are a little over half of what they were at their peak in the 90s. Why weren't stores installing locks on all their shelves in the 90s?
Two points. First, my main point is that just looking at crime rates gives you an incomplete picture - you also need to look at prevention efforts and how people react to crime, both of which are harder to measure. The fact that stores didn't use to have locks everywhere tells you something about crime levels, even if it's only how firms perceive it.
As for why stores weren't using locks in the past, one reason may be a decreased enforcement from part of the police and public prosecutors. Shoplifting small amounts is now a misdemeanor, and prosecutors conscious of incarceration rates and demographics may be reluctant to prosecute and imprison those that shoplift higher amounts. If stores perceive that the judicial system won't keep shoplifters at bay, or they are reluctant to engage with them for PR reasons, you may end up with locks in a world with overall less crime.
To further expand on this point with an extreme example, suppose that the number of people willing to commit crimes is constant over time. As society becomes richer, however, people are able to afford better crime prevention mechanisms: more secure cars, more locks in stores, more cameras everywhere, more policing, moving to safer neighborhoods and commuting longer distances, etc. This would lead to a general decline in crime rates over decades, despite the baseline levels of latent criminality being constant. Depending on the magnitude of these forces, you can both get an increase in latent crime with a decrease in actual crime, which may explain the puzzle.
Under this framework, the question is not whether there is more crime today vs 1990, but how today compares to how 1990 would look like with our current security measures.
If the reason stuff is being locked up in stores is simply because society is richer and we can afford to install more locks, then the people complaining about "public disorder" and the need to get tough on crime are completely off-base, and they should instead be yelling at the stores for installing them needlessly.
Why would installing them be needless? They serve a useful purpose. For example, as societies get richer, they spend more in health care. It doesn't follow that people complaining about "raising health costs" and the health insurance market should be yelling at people for needlessly spending money on treatments they used to do without.
I have seen no studies about this, but I would bet the willingness to pay to avoid crime is increasing in income. Being mugged in the street implies a psychological shock that goes way beyond the monetary cost of whatever was stolen, and the willingness to avoid those costs tend to be correlated to income (see, e.g. willingness to avoid queues, to avoid traffic). A society getting richer and richer would desire lower and lower levels of crime, and just being safer than in the 90s might not cut it.
If you accept the health care analogy as valid, this becomes more evident. Saying "people are healthier now than in the 90s" to someone proposing health care reform would be missing the point.
There is one very obvious explanation for statistics not matching up with people's lived experience, which is, we are not actually talking about people's lived experience.
Maybe they just saw it online.
Also, most of the decades Scott is talking about aren’t part of the lived experience of any of the people he’s trying to appease!
I myself wouldn’t say “appease”, but this sure does look like an intellectual blind spot.
was looking for this comment, and was going to post it myself if I didn't see it. It's the phones! It seems obvious to me that its the phones! We have systems that literally optimize for showing people terrible things all the time and we're all addicted to them!
Are there any age cohort effects going on here? I am firmly in the camp that crime is not appreciably worse than it was in decades past, but I can also attest to the fact that disorder annoys me more than it used to. When I was in my twenties, I feel like I accepted urban disorder as part of the texture of the city, something slightly thrilling. I have a certain nostalgia for a New York I never even experienced, when Times Square was full of porn theaters, the West Village was genuinely seedy, and subway cars were coated in spray paint.
Now litter maddens me, I wonder why the city can't do something about the tents that keep springing up in public parks, and I can't imagine what kind of psychopathy drives someone to listen to music in public without headphones. These problems don't seem worse to me than in the past, but my attitude seems to have shifted:
* Then: "The city is exciting, sometimes dangerous terrain that I have to be savvy to navigate, a playground that offers adventure to me and my friends."
* Now: "We're all just trying to live here, man. There are 3 million people crammed into a few square miles. Can you please not throw your fucking garbage on the ground?"
In other words, I've become an old person. Can some of the vibe shift be demographic? Not just the age of the population, but the age of people living in cities?
Likely also the composition. The city, in the archetypal abstract, used to be where you went if you were too weird for the suburbs. Now it's where a good career track deposits its cargo, and the weirdos move someplace where jobs are few and housing is cheap. How much more downtown is the Organization Man with the sitcom dad job than he used to be?
I suspect this is especially true for the right-leaning sub-segment of tech workers, which is a group that is disproportionately represented in the communities around this blog.
But this has been true for many decades.
>Are there any age cohort effects going on here? I am firmly in the camp that crime is not appreciably worse than it was in decades past, but I can also attest to the fact that disorder annoys me more than it used to.
Frustration tolerance is a skill, and technology significantly decreases it. Everything looks bleak compared to the simulacrum.
As to the highly specific boombox question, I always assumed that was mostly an '80s phenomenon. Everyone seems to be listening to their own earbuds, in their own little world, in my travels. Portable speakers are even easier to...port, though! Is there a resurgence of loud music inflicted on everyone else? (There were two guys who did some subway acrobatics while I was in New York a couple of weeks ago, and they may have played music, but they were generally entertaining and such a soft sell that it largely felt like a positive experience.)
Scott is softening the true irritation by calling it by the quaint name of a 1980s technology.
But it’s also objectively basically negligible compared to what it was in the 80s or 90s! There’s a reason he needs to use the quaint name to describe the problems!
I have no proof, but I'm pretty sure all of the high volume boom box playing in my Seattle neighborhood is how drug dealers make themselves known. If you need drugs, listen for the boom box.
In my neck if the woods headphones are out for poor people, boom boxes and speaker phones (to watch Tiktok everywhere) is the norm to assert their dominance.
I've encountered people playing music on boomboxes at least twice on the BART in SF in recent years, and I very rarely even go to SF.
One thing you didn't take into account is crime avoidance.
Robberies are down because people don't carry cash. Kidnappings are down, because parents monitor their kids all the time. Murders are down because people learned to avoid bad neighborhoods and not walk alone at night. and shopliftings are down because valuables are locked.
Compare this to places where "we don't even need to lock the doors".
The price we pay to *avoid* crime could be very high even though crime is down.
It would make sense for Scott to tabelate business expenses on security over the years. Good security prevents a lot of crime, especially with today's tech, thus confounding the crime stats.
It is a bit insane that shampoo is now locked away in the US. Most countries in the world don't do that. Expensive gadgets, yes, but shampoo?
It is really hard to check, also those effects could stay fir a long time after the crime stopped. I mean, if you built suburbs for people feeling from the cities to avoid crime, the suburbs still atay there even after there is no more crime on the cities.
Yeah. Like the traffic wave phenomenon where delays from a crash outlive the actual impediment to traffic.
> It would make sense for Scott to tabelate business expenses on security over the years.
I tried to do this, but it's pretty hard - most of the companies that deal with retail security / countertheft measures (Sensormatic, Checkpoint Systems, Nedap, Gatekeeper) are non-public or are small divisions of larger public companies.
The two I could find show directionally strong revenue growth:
Checkpoint Systems, a provider of NFC tags, hardware, and other antitheft measures, acquired by parent company - CCL Industries (CCL.B) for $500M when CCL was worth ~$1.5B in 2016:
CCL.B revenues:
2015: S$3.28B
2016: S$4.37B
2017: S$4.97B
2018: S$5.37B
2019: S$5.44B
2020: S$5.17B
2021: S$6.15B
2022: S$6.49B
2023: S$6.55B
2024: S$7.15B
Nedap
Revenue (€):
2019: 191M
2020: 189M
2021: 207M
2022: 229M
2023: 262M
People aren’t very good at crime avoidance because they worry about imaginary risks like their children being kidnapped when they’re far more likely to lose a large amount of cash to fraud, like phishing scams.
It is true that robberies and burglaries are not as profitable in the past. Part of the issue is also abundance. No one breaks in to a house to steal televisions or stereos or even desktop computers, not worth the hassle. There has been a large uptick in people stealing cellphones and laptops, but that is often simple pick pocketing or bag snatching from unobservant people with no violence involved. In general nonviolent crime has gotten more lucrative in the 21st century and violent crime less lucrative.
Your children being kidnapped is a lot more scary than losing a large amount of cash to fraud. I get your point, but a somewhat fairer comparison might be, "people worry about their children being kidnapped instead of their children being hit by a drunk driver."
Worrying about your kids being kidnapped by a stranger is like worrying about them being struck by lightning. It's crazy rare.
I agree it's rare, I just believe the original was a bad comparison because the two crimes differ greatly in a dimension other than probability.
Depends on what crime avoidance.
"Avoid places where sketchy individuals congregate, especially after dark," is both intuitive and probably efficient, when it comes to reduction of muggings, assaults etc.
That is not an imaginary risk, an average perp of such street crimes is a junkie in a need of cash.
I agree that other sorts of crimes don't get nearly as much attention as they should, but we are still animals living in vulnerable bodies and physical security matters to us, because it mattered to untold generations of humans and apes before us.
I don’t think people are avoiding cash for crime avoidance - for most people, we avoid cash because getting cash is an annoying errand that you don’t actually need to do to live an ordinary life the way you used to.
I don’t think people are any better at avoiding bad neighborhoods than they used to - murder is just down! It’s not like the number of people passing through bad neighborhoods has decreased, and thus would-be murderers have fewer potential targets.
On the kidnapping point I can’t say for sure - parents have in fact gotten a lot more paranoid than they used to be.
Probably it's just salience -- crimes goes down yet people see crime more often due to algo feeds and following the news 24/7 . Cf. Smartphone theory of everything
Am I missing something, or are many of your non-crime signs of disorder... actually crimes? Or does your locality not have laws against theft, vandalism, littering, and being a public nuisance?
Moreover there is a sense in which people just get away with things. We hear more about white-collar crime than we used to. ~nobody went to prison for the GFC. And "fewer people are affected by crime" is untrue for any kind of defrauding of the government. If your tax dollars went to Feeding Our Future, you didn't get to keep your money and it didn't help you indirectly via beneficial government services either.
This confuses me too. I mean some of it is subjective but by what reasonable standard is shoplifting not a crime? Honestly, I'm not even particularly angry at criminals or disorderly people, but I'm absolutely perplexed and thoroughly disturbed by the whole "crime doesn't exist" crowd.
>Or does your locality not have laws against theft, vandalism, littering, and being a public nuisance?
TBF Scott lives in/near San Francisco, so if they ever had those laws they've been rarely if ever enforced for decades, and they might well be off the books entirely.
We should also remember that Scott is if not exactly progressive himself, surrounded by progressives, and to a rough approximation no, progressives do not consider any of those things crimes.
Do you think there is more defrauding of the government now than there used to be? I don’t have a clear sense of how you would track this, especially since many do the records that would be relevant for identifying fraud didn’t exist in past decades (which makes it hard to know how much fraud actually occurred).
Ghislaine Maxwell is still jailed for trafficking underage girls to Jeffrey Epstein. It is possible that she also procured for people other than Epstein, but that wasn't established in her trial. Mostly because it wasn't necessary; the procuring-for-Epstein part alone was uncontroversial, easy to prove, and sufficient to put her away essentially for life.
For anyone confused by this response, I deleted the paragraph this is an attempted answer to, because I realized it was more likely to cause tangents rather than responses focusing on the point.
>Moreover there is a sense in which people just get away with things. We hear more about white-collar crime than we used to. ~nobody went to prison for the GFC.
I see this as a medieval peasant mindset. A bad thing happened, it's an injustice that nobody went to prison for it. Maybe witches didn't cause the famine?
I agree, I found this comment confusing. The fact that some people are willing to completely ignore that these are crimes and not do any enforcement to prevent them probably goes a long way to explaining why so many other people have a perception that crime is up and the West is falling. People sometimes say, “well those are just ‘quality of life’ crimes,” as if no one should be bothered by their quality of life decreasing. The last time I was in San Francisco, you could go to a burrito place in the Mission and there would be like 50 people outside doing drugs and selling shoplifted goods. Those are crimes, everyone knows it’s happening, and unless the situation has changed drastically since October, no one’s doing anything about it. I keep hearing about how much better things are under Mayor Lurie which really makes me wonder how bad things were before.
When people say, “well things were worse in the early 1990s/1970s New York City,” I wasn’t around back then so that’s not the comparison that’s most readily available to me. What I’m comparing against are Asian cities in developed countries like Seoul, Taipei, Tokyo, Singapore, or Beijing. None of these cities has nearly as much obvious crime going on as San Francisco. Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam also looks and feels much better than San Francisco, at least in the tourist areas, despite being much poorer.
There are also seem to be a lot of people in these comments who are unconvinced that there’s a connection between high shoplifting rates, and businesses locking up nearly everything, which obviously adds costs and drives away customers. It seems pretty obvious to me why this is happening but the prevailing ideology must be pretty strong here.
3 lines of inquiry id be interested in your consideration of:
1. The hypothesis of less lead in our lives leading to less instances of crime, mental illness, and disordered behavior. I suppose the first step is to determine if the rate of crime/disordered behavior is in fact decreased, and then testing this hypothesis.
2. Same as above, is there an association with declined birth rate (as precipitated by increased birth control and access to abortions) and less disordered/crime? Hypothetically, as the actual birth rate approaches preferred birth rate at the individual level, those children that ARE conceived & born will have more resources to support them, better outcomes including education and gainful employment. (And less likely to be disordered).
3. Is there a way to consider amount of prison population /convictions of lower crimes as a price here? (Trespassing or burglary crime statistics?) in my area general property crime seems lower than over.
I’d like to see the levels of crime and disorder over time juxtaposed with the amount of resources dedicated to preventing crime and disorder.
My sense is that the US is fifty or so years into a very expensive general public project to fix crime and disorder. All the social workers, psychological studies, expensive programs, interventions, policy changes, public health initiatives, etc. It seems like the intellectual class has taken a lot of money and power and promised, in exchange, to solve these problems, and it hasn’t. Disorder stings more when you’ve been made to sacrifice to address it, and it’s still there.
In the grid formed by the possible answers to the questions “are there problems?” and “are you paying to fix the problems?” it seems like we’re in the worst quadrant. The people complaining are trying to generate political will to push us into another quadrant.
Lots of good comments here, but I have to think the explosion in true crime media isn't helping people's perception of things. The market for true crime podcasts alone has jumped 40% since 2020: https://www.ainvest.com/news/economic-resonance-true-crime-high-profile-cases-media-driven-consumer-demand-2509/
My town became the center of one such story and I was shocked to discover how many thousands of youtube channels and podcasts there are driving non stop coverage of any story that gets on their radar. That's not going to show up in data or even the front page of the paper, but having an ever growing subgenre of media dedicated just to highlighting crime stories seems like a good candidate for impacting the vibes.
I think there is something to this. Personally, I don't consume audio or video content related to crime (or most topics that aren't related to my hobbies), and I don't see any increased crime or disorder problem. It helps that I live in a nearly crime-free superb and mostly visit low-crime areas of the nearby cities (NYC, Philly). I think the same is true for most of my friends and neighbors.
I was in the same boat (didn’t consume any crime related content, lived in a safe suburb, county murder rate around 1 per 100k), so when this murder happened down the road from me I was quite taken aback to discover exactly how many content creators dedicate hundreds of hours of streaming time to cases in small towns if they catch wind of them. Doing some digging, they seem to just move around the country focusing on different unusual crimes, making them sound as sensational as possible. I did some digging on the stats and the audiences here tend to be quite loyal, share their favorite creators widely, and ultimately drive a lot of mainstream media coverage. It’s a problem I’ve become quite fascinated by now that I’ve seen it up close!
Great discussion, but two questions: first, who are these “people” you reference? I think that plays a major role in this discussion. Second, what about the role of media? Sure newspapers have always focused on crime but we didn’t carry them around all day and night and stare at them like we do our phones.
And on top of that, phones don’t just show people whatever crime story is optimized for the front page - they show people the crime story that is optimized to catch that person’s attention.
precisely
I'm going to suggest that anxiety about crime is a proxy for more generalized economic anxiety. This anxiety has two components, one rational, one emotional. First, when people are living paycheck to paycheck and carrying a growing debt load, a single instance of car theft or credit card fraud has the potential to seriously destabilize their lives. Even porch piracy can do real damage to family finances. So crime is more feared even if it's not more frequent. Second, the more people worry about falling into poverty, the more eager they are to signal their middle class status, and that includes expressing concern about crime. It's a way of letting people know that you have something worth stealing. I think it was either bell hooks or someone bell hooks was interviewing who said that the only churches that are growing within the African American community are what the rest of us call the prosperity gospel churches, the ones that promise earthly affluence to those who stay right with God.
To test this hypothesis, I suppose you'd look at layoffs and businesses closing, the length of time a job lasts before it disappears, plus the frequency of news stories about mass layoffs, which can have an effect on economic anxiety generally.
I'm enough of a natural skeptic to suspect that the numbers have been cooked, in part because they just don't FEEL right. Pretty subjective, but I trust my senses because they've worked well so far.
Around these parts the incidence of sketchy characters roaming about is WAY up. The metric is pretty foolproof: I walk to and from work every day, and regularly encounter them now, whereas this happened basically never just ten years ago. If you leave your car unlocked, guaranteed it will be searched by someone in less than 24 hours. That would not have been the case just a few years ago. Fifteen years ago, about once a month I'd see some guy drive by and think: I bet that guy works for the cartels. Now it's a couple times a week. Subjective impressions for sure, but I'd put money on their being accurate.
Another thing is the general increase in hostile encounters, not necessarily criminal in nature, often having a racial component. I wrote about one of them here on Substack not too long ago.
To a skeptic the low numbers feel like a case of "Don't believe your lying eyes." Things are great, vote for us!
But if those numbers are accurate, that's a good thing, and it should alter our thinking. Maybe there's hope after all.
>Another thing is the general increase in hostile encounters, not necessarily criminal in nature, often having a racial component.
Yeah, I think there's a missing factor or two in the *types* of murder being up/down, and how people interpret specific risks, and how they account for specific risks.
If murder overall is down but "crazy guy on public transit" murder is up, the stats will look good while the vibes (and transit use) get worse.
All the numbers in this post show similar trends - are you saying all of these sources are cooked, all in the same way?
No, I'm saying that the figures are at odds with what my senses are telling me, rightly or wrongly. There are plenty of people reporting a similar experience. Furthermore if you are a skeptical sort, it might seem odd to you when a bunch of disconnected trends are suddenly all moving in the same direction for no readily apparent reason, in spite of other indicators. That doesn't mean it isn't real. It just gets your attention.
I'm fairly sure that there is a great deal of under-reporting of crime in some circles. I'll fall back on the example of the immigrant community near my own neighborhood. Crime stats for this area are officially fairly low. But I have known people who have lived in that neighborhood who say crime is out of control, and they would know because it affects them personally. I have personally experienced what can only be described as menacing behavior, so this resonates. What's probably happening is that most people don't report crimes because "snitches get stitches" or worse. It's their own form of Omerta.
"Suddenly?" The data in the posts goes back several decades.
>What's probably happening is that most people don't report crimes because "snitches get stitches" or worse.
Why would "snitches get stitches" result in a drop over multiple decades? Are the gangs getting progressively better and better at stopping people from answering the NCVS?
I see a sharp drop post covid. In the context of multiple decades, that qualifies as suddenly as for the second point, you are leaping to contest a point I did not make. Read it again.
Context. Get some.
You just sound like the picture perfect candidate for the "it's the phones" theory.
Please explain. I, too, am a proud dog owner by the way.
What makes you think someone works for the cartels? It’s not like they have vanity license plates.
Personal experience. I'll leave it at that.
How about this? White people write most of the articles about crime while black people are more likely to be a victim of crime. So the perception of crime is correlated to the number of articles about crime not the actual crime, and the number of articles about crime is correlated to the number of white people in proximity to crime rather than the actual crime rate.
White flight --> fewer white people in proximity to crime, media somewhat understates the disastrous nature of the crime wave in the 70s - 90s
Gentrification --> more white people in proximity to crime, media begins to talk more about crime even as it's falling, perceptions of crime increase
Very convincing! Also if more high-class people are complaining about crime that will lead to more policing which will reduce it further.
I would argue that recent policy trend has been toward things like bail reform, ending three strikes laws, and so on which are not likely to decrease crime. It is interesting that these coincide with people feeling like crime is increasing
The pendelum has swung back on those policies no? Idk I'm not an American
Am I missing something here? To me it seems like this could be explained by a difference between "risk" and "hazard"? Basically, potential problems (hazards) are still there but people found ways to avoid them (i.e., reduce the risk). For example thieves would still steal cars, but now we lock them so they can't be stolen. Nonetheless, we know (or we think) that the moment we'd keep them open, they would be easily stolen. Therefore it doesn't make us feel safer in a general sense.
Boom boxes. That was so common in New York, but I have to say it’s been a long time since I’ve run into one lately.
Run into them multiple times a day for three or four years now here in Honolulu.
Bummer. I remember nothing worse than being trapped on a subway with one of those.
I feel like it's quite common for people in NYC to play music on the subway via their phones or bluetooth speakers?
Earbuds or headphones definitely. Rarely do I encounter someone using a boom box on the train these days, but I don’t spend a lot of time on the trains so maybe I’m missing something.
The simplest theory I have is that middlebrow suburban people hate anything that isn't uniform or that has inherent conflict, and there has been a rise in the perception of disorder because
1. Political and consumer pandering to this cohort has done nothing but increase so they're the loudest voice
And related,
2. Showing these people every piece of disorder or filth even if it's literally a thousand miles away is an easy way to spook them and hold their attention for business purposes
People in the past had narrower scopes of concern and didn't have a consumer society to tell them that everything is supposed to be exactly within their expectations at all times.
>Showing these people every piece of disorder or filth even if it's literally a thousand miles away
Showing people a piece of disorder a thousand miles a way a few years ago *also* prompted them to riot and create more disorder.
The most noticeable change in my life is the increase in items locked away at retail stores for anti-theft. Based on anecdotes, that has increased dramatically over the past 6 years.
I can't find good data or explanations on why it's happening. I'd be interested if anyone has a good insight if the phenomenon is widespread and its causes.
On the previous post there were some comment threads about this. My synthesis of that discussion is:
1. It might be a response to increased shoplifting, but only partly. The decision to implement the locking mechanisms is made by fallible humans with imperfect information.
2. It is probably also a result of there being fewer employees within retail stores.
3. It is probably also a result of technological innovations that make it easier to lock things up without having to rearrange the whole store.
This is an interesting set of potential explanations!
I think you're overthinking it.
When people say crime is increasing, I think they just mean the *cumulative* amount of crime is increasing. Which is trivial, but it's also a demand that you go look directly at what they don't like: crime itself, not crime-related derivatives.
When people see crime and disorder, they feel bad, and they complain. Especially when it seems unnecessary and tolerated.
It's the same with inflation. People aren't intuitively calculating derivatives of price increases in their heads. They just don't like price increases, especially ones that seem unnecessary and tolerated.
I don’t see much about fentanyl in this piece. Nor much about migration.
Maybe I’m missing something, but couldn’t this just be due to the internet? People spent lots of time on their phones or on the computer. Lots of that time is spent on news sites and social media (both national and local). Both of those skew negative (lots of discussion on Nextdoor is crime-related). It feels like these factors make it so people consume many more minutes of crime-related information per day, no matter the level of crime. Might that explain this?
Definitely seems plausible as part of it, though it might need an explanation why social media is worse than old school local news.
> though it might need an explanation why social media is worse than old school local news
I think two easy-to-reach-for answers:
1. coverage (social media can just capture every single thing in a way that even more distributed local news couldn't)
2. optimization (social media is optimized to show you exactly what ticks you off)
Yeah, I think also there could be competition among old school media to be more engaging, so it’s become more negative or flashy or something over time. Definitely an empirical question though
Here’s an anecdote, I grew up in a high crime city. When I was young I was mildly delinquent. As a teenager we all hung out at this park. Every day, that park was like a big party of teenagers. We grouped off into what activity you wanted to do. Playing basketball, skating, smoking weed, drinking, doing graffiti, playing music. It was like the social sphere. The neighbors hated it obviously. Cops would get called at night when things were rowdy, people would run, and then the next day we’d all be back there again as if nothing happened. What are you gonna do, kick a bunch of kids out of the park?
Now, whenever I return to my hometown sometimes I’ll pass the park. There’s nobody. There’s no graffiti. There are no teenagers. Nobody is playing basketball. At most there will be a family pushing their kid on the swing set.
Ok that’s more orderly. And that place really wasn’t a good influence for us kids. But honestly, I’m kind of sad for the young generations. That was a formative experience, it was like what you see in the movies of growing up in the city in the 80s and 90s (but we were ‘00s). We lived all manner of experiences there, friendship, love, fights, fun, games, everything. Now the kids in my hometown are doing less drugs and drinking, that’s great. But they’re not hanging out en masse outdoors either. And that’s kind of sad.
I think the possibility that complaining about crime leads to lower crime rates is underrated. The mechanism here would be that crime rates are sensitive mostly to cultural context, not laws or official policies. If police and other civic actors feel the heat, they have the ability to bring crime down, but often they prefer to do other things with their time and energy. So the natural cycle is that things get worse, people complain, then things get better, but people continue to complain because the complaining is functional. Then eventually people stop complaining, and the problem starts to creep back, which quickly brings back complaining.
I'm influenced here by anthropologists who point out that complaining is a way to shape expectations. For instance, the elderly among the Ju'Huansi were constantly complaining about how nobody ever helped them with anything even though objectively they were well taken care of. The anthropologist pointed out that the constant complaining was the tool used to structure cultural expectations around elder care. If they stopped complaining, the quality of care would probably go down.
The answer has to be: people are terrible at remembering trends in anything in their own lives. Nostalgia is a powerful drug, that can make the improving but still way worse 90s seem better than today.
If people are unhappy with status quo (which they should be, given the still abnormal levels of public disorder), the past will be valorized in a nonsensical way.
this, like the vibecession, is probably just another case of vibes decoupling from reality because of social media news feeds interacting with the availability heuristic
i mean news coverage was always like if it bleeds it leads, but algorithmic feeds are even worse
So there is probably a word for this; but when the vibe is that something is bad (and maybe getting worse) and the 'facts' are that it is really not that bad and getting better, then people tend to adjust their bias point such that it looks like things are still bad. Thus if racism is a big problem (vibe-wise) and we really see less of it, we move our needle such that more things are considered racist. The same thing might be happening with crime.
Edit: Unrelated but prohibition ended in 1933, which may account for some of the drop off in crime.
This is a good point, especially identifying this as one related to perceptions of racism too.
Oh I heard someone make the point about racism. I thought it might apply here too.
There are some areas where I think crime and crimesque things are genuinely increasing, or people's exposure to them are increasing, but they aren't what people stereotypically complain about when they complain about "crime" or call for "moar police" or what-have-you.
I'm thinking specifically of things like consumer fraud. This used to be a sporadic, rare, rip-off artist comes to your door selling trinkets sort of thing. Now it's ubiquitous; anyone who doesn't block ads aggressively is invited to part with their money on false pretenses half a dozen times before breakfast. People have to have regular conversations with their parents about emails-they-shouldn't-trust and links-they-shouldn't-click.
Other examples might be increasing public-sector corruption and the impunity of the epstein class.
But this would seem to require positing some sort of psychological deflection in which people are horrified and frightened by this ballooning fraud/corruption/elite-impunity and then sublimate that for [reasons] whereupon it reemerges transformed into a somehow-more-palatable concern about "crime in the streets." (Another option might be to find that this transformation is being deliberately engineered by the governing elites, e.g. "upset about corruption, fraud, and impunity? So are we, and we know just which immigrants and negroes to slap around to do something about it. Look over there!") This seems potentially plausible but also a little too Rube Goldbergish.
I think public corruption and the impunity of the Epstein class are things that have been decreasing for decades (or anyway until the Trump administration), but there has been increased transparency about them.
Unlike crime, it's not actually clear to me that people commonly mistakenly think disorder--especially as measured via litter, graffiti, and homelessness--is much worse than in the past.
But if I go with the premise, perhaps it's more a misfiring of a common knowledge problem? People think that other people think disorder is now okay or even honorable, and that's worth fighting against. Liberals over there are perfectly content to let miscreants ruin society all in the name of CRT! Or something like that.
I think your last argument here has some explanatory oompf: crime may be down, but there being a seemingly “Pro-Crime” “Pro-Disorder” section of the populace is new, so the anti-crime voices now have the extra burden of not just calling for a solution to a problem we all perceive as a problem, but winning a culture war over whether crime is bad. Crime is bad if crime is worse, and if crime is not worse then it gives ammunition to the “Pro-Crime” side.
I notice I am surprised this topic is so ‘sticky’. Perhaps there is a silent majority not so worried about crime, but even if the commenters across these posts are a small minority; I don’t think I have observed a cohort of the ACX commentariat so closed to updates after being presented with a lot of data. What’s striking is that many comments here are still of the second sort Scott enumerated above. It feels very “arguments as soldiers.” If your data says crime is down, it must be wrong, or it is the wrong data, because crime is UP! As flawed a method as RootClaim was, I almost want to see a Steve Sailor v. Scott Alexander debate on this, perhaps nothing less would move people. While I am not impressed with their rhetorical conduct; I do think for so many otherwise reasonable people to be so closed to persuasion is evidence of something not being captured in the data story which has been told so far. To throw my anecdata into the mix: my small northeast hometown had the crime spike, but crime has remained much higher than pre-pandemic.
In which I muse on people's motivations for these comments. https://nadaav.substack.com/p/where-my-thugs-at
I tried commenting on your post directly Nadav, but substack made me do a whole sign in rigamarole which deleted my comment.
I think you’re correct in your diagnoses about media diet and tribalism—I just hoped both would be something the ACX commentariat could rise above.
I haven’t dared to look at the corresponding thread on DSL; I can only imagine what the usual characters are up to.
Sorry about the technical issues, that's weird. I thought the sign-on was universal.
Yeah it's a shame about how people are, even people who are above average intellectually.
>"I do think for so many otherwise reasonable people to be so closed to persuasion is evidence of something not being captured in the data story which has been told so far."
You've hit the nail on the head here.
I've lived in the same neighborhood in Seattle for a decade. Things got much worse with COVID, got a little better as things loosened up, but are now deteriorating again.
Anecdotal, yes, but definitely not just misperception due to (social) media, my moving from a low crime to high crime area, or any of the other dismissive "explanations" offered in support of the statistics' story.
Steve doesn't seem to be disagreeing with Scott THAT much.
(bit of a repost by me) but I'm still not convinced the phenomena of people thinking "crime is getting worse" isn't just the well known memory bias where you remember "significant" events more than mundane things.
In other words, your brain accumulates memories of crime (whether you were the victim or not) like your body does heavy metal. Modern media trends exacerbate it as now you can inject the memories of more people.
Maybe we can get data on people's _perceptions_ in other countries and time periods over time? I wouldn't be surprised if people just perceive things getting worse all the time.
The boombox thing is either about noise, or about noncriminal, generally anti-social (inconsiderate) behavior. The "people are acting more like assholes than they used to" thing might be neither crime nor disorder. Here's a big city thing that we have no data about but can collect: how many random businesses on a street will allow you to use their restroom if you walked in and made the request. Their reasons for not letting you, and the fact that they will not let you, might be a big indication of how grumpy people are in that city about crime and disorder as data about crime and disorder.
Love the piece - well thought out and takes a balanced view. What do you suppose is the reason for the human brain to do this comparison ? Are we prewired to constantly compare things ?
Is it a bit like gas prices or inflation in general, everyone notices the spike up (BLM/COVID-19 era), no one notices the gentle drift down? If so people may still be reacting to jump in 2020/2021 like they are for inflation (not a perfect analogy, inflation is more of a ratchet whereas crime can go both ways, but it does take a long time for locals to update on an area being 'safe' that used to not be considered 'safe').
Ubiquitous cameras (cell phones, ring, body cams) and algorithmic social media have made distant crime much more visceral and brought the imagery of high crime areas in the cities and certain rural areas to suburbs in a manner that the nightly news did not.
It's also missing a bit to cover shoplifting and not cover porch pirates, in certain areas at least that is probably people's most direct experience of crime.
Crime / Law & Order is a perennial political topic, but I don't think current discussion has reached the peak of the 1990's with it's 3 strike laws etc. so in some sense it is perhaps still well calibrated? I wonder how many people who were alive in the late 1980's early 1990's think crime now is worse now than then.
That said I think there are also culture wide periods of pessimism and optimism related to, but somewhat independent of, actual facts on the ground. e.g. roughly rounding dates 1920's optimistic, 1930's-WWII pessimistic, 1950's - early 1960's optimistic, 1970's pessimistic, 1980's optimistic, 1990's - 2000's pessimistic, mid to late 2010's optimistic, present pessimistic.
I think you're missing a lot of classes of 'disorder' that aren't necessarily illegal. For example, I think many people consider protest movements (now matter how legitimate) as 'disorder' in the sense that we use it here and the ubiquity of cameras has made them a lot more visible. Jan 6th, ICE protests, and especially Covid-19/BLM protests have a lot of overhang (people are slow to update). Certain types of rhetoric, e.g. Abolish the Police, could also come across as disorderly. Pot legalization and the ubiquity of stores selling the same in some states may also code as disorderly, especially to folks old enough to have lived through the war on drugs.
"especially to folks old enough to have lived through the war on drugs."
Nobody alive today remembers a time without the war on drugs!
The war on drugs started in earnest in 1914 with the Harrison Act, though the term "war on drugs" became popularized under Nixon.
Widespread legalization of marijuana notwithstanding, the war on drugs is still raging and being used to justify all kinds of authoritarianism at home and military intervention abroad.
"War on Drugs" is a marketing term, there has never really been any serious attempt to enforce drug laws in the US.
Well you’re right in a sense, that the war on drugs is not strictly about enforcing a set of laws. But to say it hasn’t sucked in a ridiculous amount of resources and caused a ton of lasting human, institutional, and geopolitical damage just like a “real” war would be plain wrong.
>It's also missing a bit to cover shoplifting and not cover porch pirates, in certain areas at least that is probably people's most direct experience of crime
Supposedly the NCVS covers this, but I'm pretty skeptical of surveys in general.
>I think you're missing a lot of classes of 'disorder' that aren't necessarily illegal.
Good point!
I don’t think protests are nearly as common in the Trump era as they were in the Bush era. And even the late 90s was actually a high-protest time - I recall the “battle of Seattle” with anti-globalization protests outside the WTO meeting of 1998 (back when opposing free trade was left-coded).
One thing I haven't seen mentioned is that there is simply a larger proportion of Americans living in urban environments. 20-30 years ago many would be living in suburban/rural environments, and would be complaining about different kinds of disorder.
Now, the complainers live in the cities and complain about the cities. Many of them did not grow up in the cities that they complain about. Their frame of reference is not the city of 20-30 years ago, it is the idyllic suburban town they grew up in.
Hasn’t the proportion of Americans living in the suburbs been constantly increasing? I suspect that the bigger factor is that the readership of this blog is concentrated in demographics who are of the age range to have recently moved to the city in defiance of the broader trend of moving to the suburbs.
This is some of those topics that comes up a lot online but doesn’t match what I or my friends see IRL. We don’t feel uncomfortable or unsafe in downtowns. You see the occasional homeless person or graffiti but for the most part things are clean and orderly. As I said in response to your previous post, is this just a SF thing?
The amount of graffiti on the walls can increase even if the amount of *new* graffiti decreases...
Thanks, I enjoyed your comment.
Here's my own personal anecdote on disorder. In the town where I live, there are now homeless people panhandling at intersections. There were not any such homeless people here even a couple years ago. Are there more homeless people now than then? Probably not, my guess is that homeless people from the nearby big city just recently decided to start going out to the suburbs to beg. So, in the past couple years, my local community's perception of disorder (begging homeless people) has gone up, even if actual rates of homelessness haven't. My guess is this is similar for people complaining about or noticing disorder in general: total disorder isn't up, but it has started moving into the suburbs where it wasn't before, so people living there perceive an increase in disorder from the local increase, even if there is no corresponding national increase in the statistics.
People spend so much time, effort and money to avoid crime that it is hardly surprising that crime is down, nonetheless this is all extremely burdensome
Are people spending as much effort on this as they were a decade or two ago? Certainly not as much as they were in the 1990s or 1980s, when it was common for white collar women to take self-defense classes.
Self-defence classes don't seem serious to me. Not like locks on everything, cameras everywhere, not going out etc
I would have thought “not going out because of perceived disorder” was much higher in the 80s and 90s. Nowadays people just don’t go out because they’d rather be on Netflix or TikTok. Self defense classes are much, much more intrusive on your life, taking up hours that you could be doing something fun, rather than locks and cameras, which you can just set and forget.
I think you misunderstand why women did self-defence classes, when you argue they could instead do something fun. It certainly wasn't due to any realistic* appreciation of what would lower their likelihood to be victimised.
Also, maybe people go out less only because of infinite streaming slop. Or maybe they also go out because out is just a less friendly and reasonable place.
* Realistic matters because the context was whether people truly spend and adjust their lives to lower their likelihood of crime (which of course they do) and if they do it more nowadays, which they also certainly do, but you might argue about intention. The easiest way to avoid being a victim of crime is to live alone, with a secure door, good cameras and never go out.
“200 decibels” he says.
>Homelessness and Tent Encampments
I think you need to separate out cities in the Ninth Circuit, where it was forbidden to criminalize camping in public from 2018-2024 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_v._City_of_Boise
And, I can attest that there were VASTLY more homeless people camping on the Venice Beach boardwalk in 2020 than there were in the early 90s (of course, you could rent a studio apt on a walk street 1/2 block from the beach for $500/mo in 1990).
I think that the original post gets it exactly (mostly?) backwards. I think that it is that a large cohort now grows up sheltered and away from cities (and/or is now sheltered and has access to social media). These people are shocked by what they see in cities because they have never spent time in cities (or never had access to a way to complain about it broadly). I think that if you live in a city (at least if you spend time outside in a city), it is pretty clear that it is safer and less disorderly than it has generally been in the past.
I live in the heart of Denver, my kids walk to the park and school, we walk as a family to restaurants, it's fantastic. People in the suburbs act like we live in a war zone.
This links to something I noticed with the ‘antitheft’ locking things up in supermarkets in England.
My entire adult life, seeing that meat or cheese (or other improbable things, to a sheltered teenager) had security locks on them was a standard sign that you were in a poor neighbourhood or cheaper supermarket. 10-20 years ago or more, a pretty standard post online would be a teenager seeing such a thing for the first time, posting about it, and then everyone replying with essentially the four yorkshiremen sketch about the ridiculous things they’d seen locked up or shoplifted. Last time I looked, I could find several older posts on Reddit of essentially this character on British-dominated subs, although much of the content was starting to be deleted. It wasn’t unusual to have in-person conversations that mirrored this, either.
A couple of years ago, I started to see posts (or throw-away comments within posts) that were different. Instead of ‘here is a thing I see in my local supermarket’ followed by replies amused by their naivety, I started to see ‘people have shared images with me of cheese locked up in supermarkets, which I never used to see, therefore extreme poverty is forcing people to steal cheese and this is the Tories fault’ or ‘people are posting images of cheese locked up in supermarkets, which was never a problem around here, so it must be gangs of Romanians robbing our supermarkets’.
People who sometimes made it clear that they barely left their own home were responding to contextless images posted online, in spaces without the ‘local’ feel of those older internet spaces, and so not getting the gentle ribbing and pushback that previously was standard.
Theory/hypothesis #5: there's been an increase in media coverage (news and social) of crime/disorder that's decoupled from the frequency of crime/disorder incidents , leading people to the (false) perception that they are increasing.
This is absolutely the truth. Worse yet, people actively seek it out for dopamine hits. That's not even to mention that we are bombarded with police procedurals in which police actually prevent and solve crime, a constant stream of shows and movies about massive criminal enterprises, etc... The reality of most crime in the US is class warfare, wage theft, unsafe working environment, industry polluting low socioeconomic neighborhoods, etc...
Perhaps crime really is down in absolute terms, but now it is more diffuse. For example, maybe 20 years ago there were 100 murders/year, but they all happened in Murdertown, where normal people don't go. So for the normies the murder rate was 0. Now, murders are down to 75/year, but 50 of them happen in Murdertown and 25 are spread out everywhere else. This is a massive increase from the point of view of everyone but Murdertowners !
I’m pretty sure that statistics have generally shown a decrease in crime rates in cities but an increase in rural and suburban areas!
It'd be interesting if it's double whammy of (more) suburbanites going to town and seeing (relative) hell, and suburban itself getting worse. Seems like something that we can actually analyze if we slice the data hard enough.
Some suburbs are well established towns of their own with established town, problems, aging infrastructure, etc.
I would also like to point out that events like shoplifting, harassment, and even obstructing traffic, used to be classified as "crimes", not "disorder"; so there's definitely some reporting bias going on.
> This feels wrong to me: people aren’t comparing the present to the golden age of 2019, they’re comparing it to the golden age of their parents and grandparents’ generation
Are they? Possibly I'm over-generalizing from my own experience, but I am _absolutely_ comparing the present to the golden age of ~2010. Things have gotten significantly worse in my neighborhood in the last 15 years (including crime, actually – index felonies in 2025 were ~30% higher than in 2010, against a ~5% increase in population), with the trend accelerating a lot in the last 5.
I agree that the very long-term trends are pretty uniformly positive (crime is way down compared to 1985!), but pointing out that things have improved over the last 40 years isn't really helpful when people are upset about how things have changed in the last 5.
The early 2010s is definitely the one time that I think there is a good case for these issues being less bad! Scott seems to have missed the huge issues of slums and shantytowns in the 1930s and 1950s.
Many of these social ills are photographed and shared online now, so they seem omnipresent.
Additionally, the media environment by which people make conclusions about their larger world has changed radically, rewarding sensational images, opinions of outrages, and a general climate of impending disaster.
Another factor is what you might call "outreach". Our local police have a helpful regular email which lists all the local crimes. They no doubt feel they're providing a public service but it just makes you feel that you live in a high crime area (which I don't). Obviously it does no harm to their job security! But less crime with more awareness is the problem Scott is highlighting.
Graffiti is patina of society.
I’ve been living in Chicago for most of my life, and here are some observations: Yes, urban life seems more disordered now. But this is mainly because of a few microclimates of disorder that are also high-traffic areas. Take the Red Line on the CTA, for example. This is one of the main subway/elevated lines (along with the Blue Line), and it runs north/south from the edge of the North Side to deep into the South Side. I take it 4-5 times a week from the north end of the city to downtown, and it’s become quite an adventure with all the homeless, miscreants, and marauders. I don’t ever remember it being this bad. On each train car you can usually find at least one sprawled-out homeless person, and the number of homeless persons increases the further you go back down the line. Most cars smell like cigarette smoke and piss. I have about a dozen crazy Red Line stories from the past two years. I have almost none from the prior 15 years.
My theory was (and still to an extent is) that the forces of disorder (homeless, miscreants, and marauders) have always existed on the Red Line, though perhaps in smaller numbers. I don’t know. But the main idea is that there are still fewer commuters, so the disorder is a lot more visible. It’s possible, too, that the forces of disorder took advantage of the empty-ish trains during the pandemic, taking them over, leaving their encampments under the bridge, and they now they still consider the trains “their own.” These people always existed; it’s just that now they’re a) more visible and b) in high-traffic areas.
Then there are all the tents set up in the public parks along Lake Shore Drive. Sometimes I take the 147 bus from the North Side to downtown (better than the train!!, but slower), and I see dozens upon dozens of homeless tents. I mean, a lot. Even in the winter. I don’t remember seeing this ever before. Perhaps the city officials are more tolerant about these tents. But similar to the point I made above, this symbol of disorder (homeless encampments) is located in a highly trafficked area. These homeless people probably existed before, but they were probably living under an overpass. I don’t know.
So…this is one localized explanation on why our perceptions don’t match up to the data. Maybe there are other Chicagoans here who can back me up or challenge me.
In New York skells traditionally favor the E and R lines for use as their bedrooms and, to a disturbing extent, restrooms. This is because these two lines are entirely underground, with no elevated stations and hence no unwelcome gusts of cold air. While this is relevant mainly during cold weather the preference exists year round.
Ah, interesting. The Red Line (and the Blue Line) are the lines with the most underground stops, so that makes sense. Also, I had to look up "skells." I lived in Brooklyn for a year (in 2005-06), and I never came across that term!
Hello I have to argument but I think the issue is that everyone is on their phones instead of talking and loving each other.
I really like this series, can't wait to see if the next episode proves me right
The spatial distribution of crime and disorder have changed in ways that make many more people upset. Crime used to be, bluntly, a ghetto problem. Now it's spread equitably across even the nice parts of town so everyone notices it. Money isn't the shield it used to be.
What a great pair of articles on crime and disorder. I knew much of this but it's really great seeing it all in one place. You have absolutely a number devastated right-wing talking points.
The reason people think crime and disorder are out of control is because any amount of crime and disorder is disheartening, and because many people were sheltered from crime and disorder in their childhood, and they miss it on some level. This series of posts is a valuable corrective.
Some of the earliest writings from ancient Sumeria talk about how the end of the world must be nigh, because of the degeneration of society. Time for everybody to just calm down and have some perspective. Though that doesn't mean we need to stop worrying about crime and disorder altogether.
A couple of years ago I noticed a tent city for the first time. The tent city is now gone, but going from zero to one was much more noticeable than going from one to zero. I can't judge broader trends using a single anecdotal data point, but subconsciously my mind tries its hardest.
What if expectations change over time? In 2026, people feel poor if they don’t have a supercomputer in their pocket. In Texas, we expect homes to have AC. Now that electric cars are becoming more prevalent, I get more annoyed at large diesel engines driving by.
One might expect that the best future should have close to zero crime, right? We have cameras everywhere, police drones, and a Black Mirror-esque reputation system that discourages bad behavior without having to imprison people. Likewise, all our money is digital, mostly harder to steal, and our homes have fewer valuables.
If we can root for AIs that cure cancer, why can’t we have higher expectations for what urban living should be like?
Another take: much of the disorder today exists only for political reasons. We decided that using force to prevent shoplifting is politically incorrect, so stores have to perform all sorts of acrobatics with locked shelves instead. If we made it legal for bouncers to kick shoplifters out, we would have less of that.
Now it’s in the past, but the pro-Palestine student encampments at universities were infuriating because colleges didn’t use the force at their disposal to resolve them.
"What do you mean there's a human shit in front of the garage?" I ask my wife. We had just moved to San Francisco from NC and were not accustomed to that sort of thing. It was 2011, so far from the hellscape you hear about today, but still had negatives. I would routinely walk over Nob Hill through the Tenderloin to my SOMA office. The most notable things to me were the plethora of car models I'd never seen: Rolls Royce, Lamborghinis, Bentleys, and G-Wagons at the Pacific Union Club. My wife actually audited it while we were there. Even though the accountants had high-pedigree college educations, you were still help and had to go in the back door of the club.
Down the hill was the worst destitution I've ever seen. Still ever seen. People openly injecting heroin on the street—which the first time I mistook for someone clipping his nails—and people with puke all over themselves head to toe. The way the crowds stepped around this was fascinating. It was like a homeless man caked in vomit was a ghost only I could see. One time when I called 911 because I thought a man was dead, I got looks like I was doing something wrong from someone with a septum piercing and a chrome bag. Mr Homeless was in fact dead and the firemen thanked me for calling it in.
When my mother in law came to visit with her friends a homeless man openly masturbated in their direction on the MUNI. I half expected them to just take my wife back at this point, but it was seen as kind of funny and not a danger to safety. Still these things started grating on my wife. We had an opportunity through our business to relocate to Santa Monica. I loved the SF tech scene and some of the amenities, but her sanity was also important. Santa Monica circa 2012 had homeless. They were constrained to the tourist areas like the Pier, definitely not in the residential neighborhoods.
There was nary a homeless encampment either. Just the stories you hear about Skid Row in downtown LA. We watched the changes over the decade. Select West LA drugs stores started having the random shit just as you walk in the store. People would let their dogs just poop while browsing the Apple store and not even clean it up. Your bike had a one-hour half-life if it was not chained up. 3 hours for the accessories on the bike like water bottles, seats and lights. I had things stolen off my bike constantly, even in short trips to get coffee.
We put up a sign, "DO NOT LEAVE PACKAGES HERE, PUT THEM OVER THE FENCE" to dissuade the FedEx guy from just leaving the package, which had a ten-minute half-life—barely enough time to race home and get whatever Amazon Prime merchandise we had ordered. One time, while viewing the Ring camera, we saw FedEx stop and read the sign. Then place the package down on top of it. My wife raced home to try to save the new MacBook she had ordered. Alas, it was saved.
Reporting a bike incident the police would just laugh at you. Sometimes, at least in Santa Monica they would humor you with a report. One of my coworkers who lived downtown was punched in the face by a vagrant. This was just prior to covid and the concern on slack was he used "homeless" and not that he was punched in the face. He didn't report that incident either.
By 2020 our local post office was outright overrun. You could not use the post office due to the number of tents in the parking lot. Statistically maybe you were safe, but no one dropped off packages anymore. Guaranteed harassment if you did. Old ladies had to walk into busy streets to avoid walking through tent clutter on the sidewalk. Even in nice residential neighborhoods littered with 1.2 - $2 milion dollar homes (I know all the security is in the neighborhoods with $5 million+ homes). Everything in local stores ended up behind glass. You had to ask someone to get laundry detergent. It felt like a dystopian ghetto you'd find in 80s/90s scifi.
We moved in 2022. Since being back in a mid sized town, I can leave my bike unattended while getting coffee. Packages and other items we leave on the porch are never stolen. My car window has not been smashed even if I leave a MacBook and iPad on the seat in plain view.
In my experience there’s less visible crime now than there was in 1989, but more than there was in 1999.
Most memorably for me:
My car window was deliberately smashed in 2021 (presumably an attempted theft, but there was nothing in my car they took)
I was threatened with violence by a sidewalk psychotic around 2022
Windows at my job site were smashed by Hamasniks in 2023
My motorcycle was stolen in 2025
This year thieves stole cough drops from my Amazon package (though they left the book that was with it, apparently criminals don’t read C.S. Lewis!)
On top of all that I now have to wait for many minutes for a store employee to unlock the case where socks or toothpaste are kept.
But I haven’t noticed any boomboxes since at least the ‘90’s.
It's amazing how much stuff is locked behind cases now. Anything over $20 that is easily concealable, such as small clothing items and non-bulky toiletries. This is obviously a big enough of a problem that Walmart considers the enormous inconvenience to customers and their staff worth the tradeoff.
Boomboxes? I thought those disappeared in the 90s. I have not seen one in public since then. Could this be a local phenomenon in the Bay Area that is bound to spread nationwide?
They are bluetooth-enabled speakers, with a rechargeable lithium ion battery, and a convenient carrying handle so people can broadcast their poor life choices in music format.
every smartphone is a boombox
No smartphone is a boombox. It's not about electronic sophistication, it's about the boom. Which means acreage of speaker, and drive power, and those don't fit in a smartphone form factor.
Boomboxes are much more annoying than smartphones, when used irresponsibly.
Somehow I find the timbre of those tinny little speakers even more annoying.
But yes, I think Scott is using the term "boombox" loosely.
Annoying up close, but it doesn't carry as far as a good bass, If you want to annoy an entire bus or subway car, a boom box is the way to go.
I've encountered people playing music on large portable speakers at least twice on the BART in SF in recent years, and I very rarely even go to SF.
The day before this was posted, the mayor of Oakland’s car was stolen from city hall.
It is hard to overestimate the kind of disorder found in the Bay Area, especially SF, where I have been threatened and assaulted on multiple occasions by people experiencing being unhoused and insane.
I don’t know what kind of statistics capture this disorder, but that is a question about statistics, rather than about what is actually happening in the city.
It's actually very easy to overestimate. Just ask anyone online and they'll show you.
I think this is missing something fundamental. Why would one say, "disorder in cities is a problem?" Maybe because one has charts showing it's an increasing problem, sure.
But what if you had a major political movement to declare, as smugly as possible, that disorder in cities is not a problem and the people who say it is are weak racist wyppl? You know this is happening, you hint at it when you talk about how you're framing this piece.
That is: it's not that urban disorder is worse than in the past; it's that in the past, there was broad implicit agreement that urban disorder was bad acts by bad people, and now we have to defend that premise out loud.
I think you're brushing off the population aspect too easily. I, like many other people, do not care about how many people are getting murdered and robbed in some godforsaken ghetto, because the time they spend doing that to each other is time that is not spent doing so to the more affluent. If various attempts at integration are responsible for the perceived increase in crime by more productive members of society, then the solution is not more policing, but more aggressive gentrification and containment measures.
Gentrification is the problem - if you wouldn’t move into poor neighborhoods you wouldn’t experience the problems of poor neighborhoods.
>Gentrification is the problem - if you wouldn’t move into poor neighborhoods you wouldn’t experience the problems of poor neighborhoods.
It's not like the neighborhoods are themselves cursed, gentrify them enough and the problematic population goes away.
But the transition period is what the person I’m replying to was complaining about.
Are the problems of poor neighbourhoods okay as long as they only affect poor people?
I think that was implicit in the premises of the person I was replying to. If you don’t accept that, then you should actually think about the problems rather than just saying “its the poor people’s fault”.
My opinion is that a large chunk of the country has a psychological need to see the country as declining, and a subset of the news media that is happy to give them what they want.
I think it's difficult to deny that the USA has grown more secular over the past several decades. Christianity doesn't have the same cultural power it once did, and more and more of the society openly rejects it. For a certain kind of literally minded person, this *must* result in society going downhill, because- well, what if it didn't? What if had gay marriage and fewer people going to church and more people scoffing at the Bible and society got healthier and happier? What if things got better as people got less godly? For some people, facing this idea would, I think, be devastating. When I read their posts, I almost sense a glee in the idea that society would fall, because it would validate their worldview.
My other theory is that Boomers got the high crime rates of the 70s stuck in their heads and haven't updated since.
We need a third post on why people think that people think crime is going up even when people do not actually think crime is going up (https://news.gallup.com/poll/697124/crime-seen-less-serious-second-straight-year.aspx).
As much as I hate to say it, the 1990s were 26 years ago. Saying "Sure, [thing] is up, but it's still lower than it was in the '90s!" isn't going to be convincing to many people - especially the non-negligible portion of the adult population who do not remember the 1990s.
Crime distracts from disorder, and disorder distracts from crime.
I live in Tucson, Arizona. A quick web search shows Tucson is high above the natural average in crime trends, easy enough to verify. We have been in the news because of a high-profile abduction of a person. It takes a minor celebrities relative being kidnapped to break into the national discourse.
I have lived here most of my adult life, since 2007, and in my opinion crime and disorder are both far worse than when I moved here. I once had a guy try to break into my apartment while I was home. This was in the Dodge-Flower neighborhood, one of the more notorious neighborhoods for crime. Uncomfortable encounters with unstable people on the street are very common. I take the bus, most people here drive. Obviously if you have a car its easy to avoid most of the unpleasantness on the streets. There are plenty of places I, as a white guy, would not go.
Littler is a major problem. Tucson has a number of washes, where rainwater is redirected. These are often filled with trash and dumped furniture, especially at crossings with arterial roadways. Litter is highly prevalent, and the city seems to do little about it. I've seen volunteer groups cleaning intersections, but the intersections outnumber the volunteers. I see litter everywhere, with the city doing little beyond passive measures like emptying public wastebins which are easy to locate downtown but typically only present at bus stops. I've observed people digging through those for cans and sometimes lighting the bag on fire, which can go unaddressed for days or even weeks.
We also have loads of homeless, the 'boom box' guys, and some graffiti, though I dont think the graffiti is too bad.
Localities pressure stores to not report shoplifting: https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/shoplifting-data-Target-Walgreens-16647769.php
When they do, the rates jump straight up.
I think it's more complicated even than that, but graffiti is a good example.
Why is graffiti bad?
Municipalities will spend untold amounts of money and planning capacity on "public art" which usually nobody likes, and spend untold amounts more on removing the much more popular public art that Nature provides for free. Far fewer budding graphic artists are inspired by Jeff Koons than by the top end of our urban folk tradition. Isn't it, in the liberal sense, a classic victimless crime? Somebody built an ugly concrete wall, and somebody else – many somebodies else, a whole ecosystem of somebodies else – made it less ugly. What is there to complain about?
What is it about graffiti that actually makes people mad?
Opponents of graffiti typically don't discriminate between skilled and unskilled graffiti. Smash 137 is as bad as Cool "Disco" Dan. The problem isn't technical skill, but lack of authorization. They didn't go through the proper process. They didn't get the right permits. They _broke_ the _law_. And even in cases where they didn't, where the city has set aside a place where graffiti is tolerated... it's still a fundamentally antisocial form, isn't it?
But what does "antisocial" mean here?
Graffiti is a phenomenon of contested spaces, a record of vitality and lack of obedience. (Lack of obedience, not "disobedience" – paganism, not Satanism.) This is already offensive to a certain (class-linked) way of seeing the world, which we can call _salaryman consciousness_. What is it like to be a salaryman? What kind of consciousness does it require to be a trusted functionary of a hierarchical system? It certainly requires obedience, but that's the bare minimum. A former Apple employee described it to me like this: because Tim Apple leads the whole company, but can't _see_ the whole company, it's the duty of Tim Apple's soldiers to _install a Tim Apple tulpa_, to simulate Tim Apple in their head to the greatest useful fidelity, and to follow its commands. One ceases, in a sense, to be an independent organism, with independent strength, and an independent sense of vitality, and assumes one's role as a member and representative of apple, and a follower of Tim Apple, within a hierarchy that's much more powerful than any individual, but much less agile and much less free.
The question of the consequences of salaryman consciousness is too large for this comment box to contain. One reasonable follow-up might be: to what extent can we have a republic of free men when the professional-managerial class is socialized into something not entirely distinct from a refined and controlled Führerprinzip? Another might be: to what extent does this resemble Eye-of-Providence monotheism as a technology of scale and control? But the most relevant question here is: how does this impact the salaryman's judgment of contested and uncontested spaces, and of signs of vitality?
Suppose you live in a place with bare surfaces, but no graffiti. What does this mean about the people who live there? What does it say about the culture of a place that it hasn't developed a subculture of people who value art and vitality over obedience? It's a signal with positive and negative aspects: obedience culture (of which salaryman culture is a part) is incompatible with mugging, so your wallet, and your self-image as an apex predator who can go anywhere alone at night unperturbed, will be undisrupted, but it's also incompatible with culture and art, and (perhaps increasingly) with having a fulfilling social life. Didn't Malcolm X once say something about white people needing to be _taught_ how to dance? It's like that. The mental structures you need to simulate Tim Apple in your head, or to work in the kind of compliance department Patrick McKenzie writes about, aren't as easy to take off as a necktie: they're a culture, into which the children of the managerial class (or the "bourgeoisie", if you want to pretend you're in 1920s Vienna) are acculturated, and they come with certain tradeoffs. There are other cultures that come with other tradeoffs, and in some cases the upside is that you get to have a lot more fun, and a lot more vitality, than the man in the gray suit who spends his whole life in _owned space_.
> but it's also incompatible with culture and art, and (perhaps increasingly) with having a fulfilling social life
Japanese people are plenty capable of all of that, and they're probably one of the most hierarchial societies around. You do not need to be the same person everywhere. You can be open with your friends and family while still acting your part at your workplace.
Japanese people also seem capable of appreciating and producing art, given the global reach of Japanese culture.
In fact, many of the greatest works of art and culture were produced by societies which, by our standards, were extremely hierarchical.
Speaking for myself, I don't like graffiti, but I do like public art like murals etc. I just think most graffiti is ugly, and part of the public art process that you describe (imperfect though it may be) is to try to nudge things into producing art that is less ugly.
Maybe it is just aesthetic preference, but I would prefer this https://housingmatters.urban.org/sites/default/files/styles/850x450/public/2022-11/shutterstock_480940900_850x450.jpg
to this https://cdn.britannica.com/93/171293-050-D99BEDB2/Graffiti-Berlin-Wall.jpg
And ultimately, I don't think it's fair to property owners or to the public to give a heckler's veto on which we get to have in our city.
As a store manager of the most successful big box chain department store in America currently that’s based out of Little Rock, Arkansas - I can tell you that out of the 120-150 times I stopped a person thieving (meaning, me personally and not one of my co managers!) over the last 5 years i have reported it three times due to the egregious nature of the theft.
Otherwise this isn’t worth the 2 hour ordeal of having to personally catch the person leaving my building with merchandise, making sure they don’t run away without touching them, wrangling them into an area, politely holding them there, making sure my camera guy got the theft on video, waiting for the police, filing all the reports, etc … I have too much shit to do.
I’m one store out of almost 300 and the people I have talked to feel the same exact way.
I understand this is an anecdote - but it’s also not. I could of course be lying. Or my memory could be inflating things. And maybe it was worse in 1997 - I wouldn’t know. But it sucks now - and it sucks knowing nothing, literally zero, is being done about these people.
Heh, I get a laugh out of the way you give your employer’s name without actually giving your employer’s name. Just like how I always say that I work for the Extremely Large Online Retailer.
In any event, another big downside to catching and detaining a shoplifter is that it can very easily turn deadly. That is NOT worth the risk.
Absolutely!
18 months ago a guy saw he was being watched, put all the merch down, went around where no one was, and put his gun under a pile of denim.
Only reason I didn’t talk to him like 3 minutes before is because an employee needed my help urgently with something - fuck that.
The company is insured for theft and hires a 15$ an hour retired person to stand around and pretend to be security. They don’t care - no way I will.
But it all leads to more and more ‘ disorder ‘ as Scott calls it here. But it’s not … it’s tens of thousands of unreported crimes from just one retailer.
another data point for my Liability Law Theory of Everything
Okay, but even if you don't report it, it would still show up in the shrink statistics that Scott cited, no?
We cook those numbers to the tune of 1-2k a week per store - and that’s bare minimum.
We cooked them in my other retail establishment, and every other I’ve ever heard of.
There is no reason to think that disorder is increasing--that's a red herring. But people become more defensive/rally around their community/become more aggressive toward outgroups under certain conditions:
1) Resources appear scarce and/or higher economic inequality:
Sectoral Economies, Economic Contexts, and
Attitudes toward Immigration: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdf/10.1017/S0022381612000849?casa_token=-VDb0NbkPkoAAAAA:lG5OZ4x_wnQwTxKrIrggkcOT_XqTgeDR1deSyBZUtOJJKJMoAOZyJo7uRlZAdyegikB5RSZ9qudF
Although the economy is strictly numerical terms has gotten slightly better/held steady in recent years, public attitudes are still mostly negative: Most Americans continue to rate the U.S. economy negatively as partisan gap widens (Pew study 10/2025):
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/10/03/most-americans-continue-to-rate-the-us-economy-negatively-as-partisan-gap-widens/
2) Group ID or status appears threatened and/or symbolic threats to same:
Status Stress: Explaining Defensiveness to the Resolution of Social Inequality in Members of Dominant Groups:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/336955867_Status_Stress_Explaining_Defensiveness_to_the_Resolution_of_Social_Inequality_in_Members_of_Dominant_Groups
It's hard to measure changes in this, obviously you can't just ask "Do you feel more threatened by black people now?" but it seems plausible, what with the rise of widespread pushback against the anti-racism agenda. Note that whether or not minorities are or should be threatening the status of mainstream communities isn't the point, but whether or not mainstream Americans are feeling their status as being threatened (rightly or wrongly), and how that affects their perceptions of social disorder.
3) Rapid demographic or social change:
The threat of increasing diversity: Why many White Americans support Trump in the 2016 presidential election: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1368430216677304?casa_token=IdicTqpEVncAAAAA:qNHHjmnwDYNE_J951tgjSNqqBgGAkQ9Ubfx2Qm-IzV5wcK7Y7ZdaqcrxSGANA95qZv44VdzWtVqd-w
As for whether this is increasing recently, this is interesting because one could see the backlash against immigration as fitting this framework. The population is aging, which puts a different perspective on it. Wealth disparity is increasing, which also aligns with point 1 above. Once again, I want to point out that whether or not people are right to feel this way isn't the issue--whether they feel that way (for whatever reason) and how that affects their perceptions of disorder is.
4) Spread of Politically Polarizing Media:
Do I need to elaborate on this? Anyone want to challenge the claim that mass media is more polarizing today than previously?
It ain't about actual rates of social disorder, it's about what might cause people to perceive increasing social disorder, and how that might play out in attitudes toward crime.
"Like"
I'd intuit it less as "crime as a proxy for disorder", and more as "crime as a proxy for social trust", with a dash of "crime as a proxy for population density".
"Social trust" is a very wishy-washy, you-know-it-when-you-see it term that covers a lot of hard to define components of community life. It covers all the little niceties like "do you say good morning to people you walk past in the neighborhood?", the bigger trust issues like "are you comfortable leaving your door unlocked while you nip to the shop?", and the minor etiquettes of "do people return their supermarket trollies before driving away?". It's a lot of individually-minor things that add up to inform the impression you have of how friendly your environment is.
I think it's intuitively obvious to most observers that general social trust has declined over the past fifty years or so. Some of that is cultural - people tend to behave how they feel they're expected to behave, and today we're constantly bombarded with outrage-bait about how awful everyone and everywhere is.
Some of it, I think, is an artifact of population densities. People don't interact with a perfectly representative sample of their local neighbours. In a small town of 1,000 people, you might get one properly unsavoury person, but then everyone knows them as "that one person". In a town of 100,000 people, you might get the same proportion of unsavouries (100), but you're much less likely to interact with just the one. Instead, you'll hear of groups, or see multiple different bad actors, and then you fit that to your intuitive impression of how sketchy the town is.
As populations get denser and more urbanised, we're all more exposed to more of the outlier elements, even if the absolute proportion of those elements stays the same (or even goes down).
I theorize that whatever side someone comes down on with regards to this topic can be fairly well predicted by their general political alignment, regardless of either their personal experience or grasp of the relevant data, and that whatever argument(s) is/are used to justify their stance will be backfilled in later.
Disorder noise isn't just people carrying boomboxes, this should include people playing loud music while in or on vehicles, and also what are probably deliberately loud vehicles.
What about vehicles that are not deliberately loud, but have big loud engines or air brakes? What about talking in loud voices? How about crying babies? Barking dogs? Squeaky hinges on doors? Wheeled luggage that goes ka-thunk ka-thunk ka-thunk down the sidewalk? Wearing loud colors? Signs in all caps?
Not sure what your point is. Oversized subwoofers are a major problem. Low frequencies travel very well over long distances. I have felt my windows shake in their frames from subwoofers 50 feet away. It's absolutely a major problem and should be a fineable offense, perhaps with impounding the car after repeated violations. But as far as I know, it's perfectly legal. And good luck getting the police to respond to a moving noise complaint.
Really, a major problem? Maybe you're a high-end recording artist, and these subwoofer sounds are interrupting your sessions and ruining takes while Rick Rubin looks at the clock and drums his fingers on the desk? He costs a lot per hour.
Windows actually shaking in their frames? Are these double-hung windows with old wooden frames? Maybe you've got bad tensioners?
My point is, if nothing else, that sensitivity to these kinds of things is subjective.
You're right, quality of living is a non-issue. How silly of me.
If loud subwoofers occasionally driving by are what falls into the category of a "major problem" for you, and not a non-issue, then your quality of living must be extremely high.
I think you are trying to be annoying. You have succeeded. Congratulations.
I was listing what annoys me, not trying to eliminate anything which might annoy anyone.
My point is that I'm rather sensitive to noise. Noise makes my life worse. I'll cut slack for noise which seems to have a purpose like home and street repairs. I have no fondness for noise that just seems to be for people who like making noise.
Sorry, you're partly right: I was being annoying, and it was on purpose. But it wasn't pointless; I was making the same point I made to Doug A above, that the extent to which these things are actual problems is subjective. There's always going to be things that annoy people, some of which are things that have a purpose, others that don't. Elsewhere it was stated, and I agree, that there is probably some optimal level of tolerance for these annoyances. Too much tolerance and you get lawlessness, too little and you get stifling totalitarianism. But I think the optimum you expressed is probably too far on the stifling side.
Thank you very much. It's so rare to see someone modify an opinion.
As for "subjective", that doesn't necessarily mean arbitrary or disposable. Noise and air pollution affective health, even if some people aren't very sensitive to them.
I realize that some people really like being noisy. On the whole, they can make my life worse.
On the other hand, I've been seeing more complaints about fireworks in the past few years, but I love fireworks, especially the big sky bursts. Drone displays aren't a substitute.
It's not much recompense, but I pass the word about earmuffs for dogs, cats, and horses.
I enjoy how Scott includes boomboxes in every section even without statistics or external info relevant to them, purely because his auditory sensitivity (which is real and which I respect) makes it his personal carthago delenda est.
I think you are missing the actual reason here. In the past there was a LOT of crime, but for the majority of people, your actual experience of crime was to see it on your television on the nightly news or in the newspaper the next morning, packaged and explained to you in a way that didn't feel like it was happening on your doorstep. Maybe once or twice in your life would you have the experience of witnessing a violent crime, such that, while terrifying, it was a very rare thing for you to actually see in its unedited, graphic reality.
NOW (and with increasing velocity due to the huge rise of vertical video starting in the pandemic era), it is possible to see in our "feeds" every day countless eyewitness viral videos of disorder - shoplifting, destruction of property, assault, and even graphic murder. Right there on that phone in your hand, inside your house.
Depending on how your algo has been tuned (or how you have unwittingly tuned your algo!) you may see this disorder, relative to non-disorder activity showing up in your feeds, at 10X or 100X the actual rate of disorder in the wider world. In fact, the it may be that those videos are unwittingly (or indeed wittingly!) temporally or geographically mislabeled to ratchet up any feelings of fear they might inspire.
And further it may be that by setting up their content delivery algos to reward certain behaviors by the content consumers that then boosts certain types of content, the platform owners may have unwittingly (or indeed wittingly!) ensconced us in a "media" climate in which it certainly seems to everyone, passively consuming whatever content shows up on their devices, that disorder is really getting out of hand!!
And that is why it "feels" like the world is getting more dangerous. We have screens in our pockets telling us every day that the world is getting more dangerous.
Could the public disorder issue, paradoxically, be caused by more rigid policing of assault and battery? Hear me out.
I hear lots of anecdotes about strangers saying aggressive things with a threatening demeanor, but not in a way that is explicitly illegal. For example, one commenter said he was recently told by a stranger, "I hope the Devil rapes you." That's an example of disturbing disorder, but it's not prosecutable.
I don't think it was prosecutable even in the 1960s, but I wonder if society was more willing to look the other way while the recipient of that comment responded with an illegal punch. Which would have served as a major deterrent, even for most mentally ill people. After all, even severely mentally ill people typically have some sense of self-preservation.
These days, even retaliatory THREATS are routinely prosecuted as assault. I don't know what the solution is; we can't necessarily have people go around threatening and punching each other to defend their honor, because hypersensitive people see threats and insults that were never intended.
Maybe we need to bite the bullet and restrict disturbing speech like "I hope you die" or "I hope you get raped?" Or maybe we need to regulate yelling more. I know that's opening a can of worms, and most of us don't want to go there. But if the alternative is having streets so disorderly that people vote for brutal authoritarianism out of desperation, maybe it's better to bite the bullet preemptively.
"I don't know what the solution is; we can't necessarily have people go around threatening and punching each other to defend their honor, because hypersensitive people see threats and insults that were never intended."
That sounds a lot like a self-correcting problem, and the norm in places and eras without a functional government. In the absence of centralized law enforcement, honor culture develops and threats and insults invite retribution from the injured party.
It's not necessarily a self correcting problem, because societies based on honor culture are sometimes full of senseless death and violence. In those particular societies, it's not like you always conduct an effective investigation to determine if your loved one was justified when they said they were dishonored. You assume people in your team generally tell the truth, and that outsiders don't.
Sure, that kind of society is superficially polite, and that's great until you are walking down a quiet alley and you get shot in the back for having the wrong family member or the wrong God.
Could the public disorder issue, paradoxically, be caused by more rigid policing of assault and battery? Hear me out.
I hear lots of anecdotes about strangers saying aggressive things with a threatening demeanor, but not in a way that is explicitly illegal. For example, one commenter said he was recently told by a stranger, "I hope the Devil rapes you." That's an example of disturbing disorder, but it's not prosecutable.
I don't think it was prosecutable even in the 1960s, but I wonder if society was more willing to look the other way while the recipient of that comment responded with an illegal punch. Which would have served as a major deterrent, even for most mentally ill people. After all, even severely mentally ill people typically have some sense of self-preservation.
These days, even retaliatory THREATS are routinely prosecuted as assault. I don't know what the solution is; we can't necessarily have people go around threatening and punching each other to defend their honor, because hypersensitive people see threats and insults that were never intended.
Maybe we need to bite the bullet and restrict disturbing speech like "I hope you die" or "I hope you get raped?" Or maybe we need to regulate yelling more. I know that's opening a can of worms, and most of us don't want to go there. But if the alternative is having streets so disorderly that people vote for brutal authoritarianism out of desperation, maybe it's better to bite the bullet preemptively.
"The 1930s - 1960s were a local minimum in crime and disorder of all types."
How real is this massive U shape in the graph? Should we trust data from this time to be accurate? Is there any plausible cause for such a drop?
The only thing that really seems to match up would be the end of Prohibition in 1933, which could make sense because gangs tend to produce a lot of violence, much like modern drug gangs have since the 1970s. But Prohibition only started in 1920. Does that little blip right before Prohibition mean that this pattern should have started 15 years earlier? But if so, that only pushes the question back: What would have changed right after WW1, when murders were supposedly increasing up to that point? And again, do we trust the data from that time?
> Nor does it explain why we should update so strongly on this unique period that we still feel cheated sixty years later when things aren’t quite as good.
You identify some common human thought patterns here, but also, I don't think most people today remember the pre-crime-wave era. Are they anchoring on popular perception of this era?
I wonder if people anchor on *trends* or *expectations* more than anything else. In https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/which-party-has-gotten-more-extreme?utm_source=publication-search you refer to my comment that some of the opinion polls showed a trend reversal among Republicans in the 90s, which feel like them becoming more extreme if you expected them to keep going the same direction. If we went from "horrifying dystopia" to "fine" from the 90s to the 00s, and people expected that meant that by now we would be at "Japanese-style utopia", that might explain some of the "vibe crime wave."
I also don't want to dismiss people's personal experiences, but we should consider the hypothesis that the vibes are bad largely due to propaganda campaigns designed to convince people the vibes are bad. It's all well and good to wonder if we're missing some problem that isn't showing up in the measurements, but nobody ever said bad vibes about public disorder or crime can only respond to real changes in public disorder.
I like Scott's post here but he's continued with his intensely rigid commitment to mistake theory. Bad faith actors are doing bad things for selfish reasons and tricking the public. Scott's faith in humanity is so boundless that sometimes he ties himself in knots explaining away bad faith behavior.
I want to revise my position, actually. I don't think propaganda or other deliberate bad-faith actions are the only alternate explanation. The coordination failure of "videos that make people angry get lots of views, so it's profitable to post and recommend them" can contribute to disproportionate perceptions of crime or disorder, without anyone involved setting out to convince the public of anything.
I still think they're doing bad things for selfish reasons and deliberately tricking the public. The selfish reason is to create markets for themselves and make money. Don't we have 30 years of leaked emails and audio from Fox News showing they don't really believe what they say?
Some people are doing bad things for selfish reasons, yes. I think if you write comments referencing vague "bad faith actors" like your original, you should be more specific about who you're accusing, like "Fox News executives", because it's easy for your comment to be read as an accusation of dishonesty against anyone who claims disorder is getting worse.
I'm willing to concede that you have done your homework and convinced me that maybe crime isn't overwhelmingly worse than it used to be, for some value of "it used to be".
What raises my blood pressure is how *brazen* it seems to have become since I was middle-aged. Gangs raid stores for a smash-and-grab. Every traffic light with a median has somebody standing there risking an accident and begging for a handout, sometimes (though I admit not usually) aggressively. Tent cities in downtowns that didn't used to have them. "Mostly peaceful" protests with businesses set on fire. Chains leaving San Francisco because shoplifting is destroying their profit margin and there is literally nothing they can do about it -- not even hiding half their wares in locked cabinets.
Comments here seem like they treat graffiti as childish vandalism, but I always read the graffiti I see as gangs marking their turf, which is not calming.
Crime has always been an antisocial activity, but these days it seems more like an in-your-face revolutionary activity. (Books literally espousing the theory that shoplifting is restorative justice aren't helping.) I'll admit that some of my examples are things I have not seen in person, so maybe the internet is causing me to see it as more common than it is, and maybe in the old days The News wasn't so dependent on raising my cortisol levels.
But in my mind, crime these days doesn't seem like grit in the wheels of progress but as a sign that society is breaking down. Maybe I'm just old.
"I'll admit that some of my examples are things I have not seen in person, so maybe the internet is causing me to see it as more common than it is." This. This is it.
An hour's worth of 4k HD ragebait videos of brazen crime with ten thousand angry comments would be a photo or two and a newspaper article a few decades ago.
Wait, are you really comparing contemporary disorder and homelessness to that of the 1930s without talking about Hoovervilles (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hooverville) or the slum clearances of the 1930s-1970s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slum_clearance_in_the_United_States)?
Anyone who thinks contemporary disorder and homelessness is worse than the 1930s wasn’t alive then.
My maternal grandfather (an ivy league-trained psychologist, 1923-2021) used to talk about how during summers in high school he would stow away on freight trains as a way to travel. He made it sound like lots of teenagers did that back then, perhaps others can verify. If that's what Harvard-bound high school students were doing for fun in the 1940s, imagine what the thuggish high school dropouts were doing.
The hobo life is romanticised now, but I'm sure hobos were not all good-natured.
Although one thing in favour of the 1930s is that the worst drug the average hobo would have had access to was alcohol. And that's bad, but it's a lot better than crystal meth.
I’m not sure where you are getting your information; there were many potent psychoactive drugs back then (1930s) that you could readily obtain—including methamphetamine (then marketed as Benzedrine)! The 1930s is also the decade that lays claim to the film Reefer Madness, whose production was a response to a perceived spike in the use of cannabis, and the antisocial affects people believed it to cause.
I think you might be stretching the point by saying they were readily obtainable. Benzedrine sure, speed, as diet pills, was going strong well into the 60s. cocaine was around. But I think Melvin is correct in that rhe drug hobos usually got to was alcohol. Whether that is better than pot is a matter of disagreement.
Refer madness was produced in 1936 by a church group that was concerned about their teenagers (the rise of black jazz musicians was a big part of it, as pot was very associated with that culture) and by 1938 it had become basically soft core pornography “disguised as moral instruction.” An independent producer saw it, realized the promise of it and bought the rights. He recut it to make it as vulgar and suggestive as possible, and it was reasonably successful. It was never treated as anything but a joke after that.
Most of this is derived from Wikipedia, but I remember seeing the film myself in the 70s and having a good chuckle. it is so over the top and we all knew that smoking pot didn’t lead to any of these terrible things.
I don't know what the pie chart of hobo drug use was exactly (does anyone?), I was refuting Melvin's statement that alcohol was the only drug the average hobo had access to and that meth was nowhere to be found. (By the way, alcohol remains the most popular drug of abuse.)
My point about Reefer Madness was that cannabis was available and not some exotic secret.
"Tryin' to live the hobo's life/Stabbin' folks with my hobo's knife..."
The Hooverville residents of the time wouldn't have resembled the addicts/schizos in a modern tent camp. One is poverty, the other is something else.
Poverty is a great leveler. It makes it much more difficult to choose who you spend your time around.
Those "disorders" you mentioned are all crimes.
I suspect that it feels far more disordered to us when instead of hearing about some miscreants being pursued by police we are told that the authorities are actively allowing some bad thing to happen and society is going off the rails.
In the previous media/social ecosystem most journalism had to write for people with a range of political views and we heard opinions from friends on the other side. This meant that when you read this stories you would often come away with the sense: ok I really don't like X government policy but I at least understand that it is the result of people in good faith struggling to achieve goals I can understand. When you only hear it described from one side it feels like society itself is unraveling and since you don't even understand the kind of concerns that motivate the other side you start to become the caricature the other side has of you.
If the media you consume doesn't present the concerns opponents of voter ID laws have in a non-caricatured way it just seems like people are challenging the very idea only citizens should vote and society is falling apart. If the concerns about how campaign finance laws limiting corporate spending would apply to entities like the NYT isn't raised it feels like SCOTUS is just corruptly handing power to big buisness. In response you get heated and demand simplistic responses that wipe away that corruption and lawlessness which become even more grist for amplification.
I don't have a good solution because once you've left the stable region of the system you get pushed further and further away. The incentivizes favor even more simplistic partisan coverage, less cross-tribe friendships and continually amplify the sense that society is spinning out of control.
Couldn't another explanation be the internet making people aware of societies that have less crime, and realizing that the current rate (down relatively as it is) is still intolerably high compared to east asia, let alone western europe? Dovetails into the "Japan trip" phenomenon I've heard discussed recently where people become more visibly authoritarian after visiting Japan and being impressed by their society.
Do Japanese tourists get American-pilled in some way after visiting here?
Maybe a little? I actually have hosted two Japanese friends before when they came to the states. I don't think any of them had really *political* takeaways like Americans going to Japan often get. But both of them were surprised by the extreme friendliness, casualness, and lack of inhibitions of Americans, I think in a good way. Strangers striking up conversations at random for example.
Also they really, really, really liked shooting guns.
I've heard two cases of people getting radicalized after going to America. Though I can only remember one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayyid_Qutb
Radicalized in what direction?
It's harder for the rest of the world to get America-pilled, because the rest of the world already knows what's going on in America, and America barely knows what's going on beyond its own borders.
That said, occasionally people will visit America and realise all the good things that you haven't been sharing with us, like diner breakfasts, and American-style BBQ, and fish tacos. OK I just realised all my examples were food.
Have you heard of Paris Syndrome? It's a legitimate phenomenon where Japanese people go to France expecting a civilized, cultured society, and then have a mental breakdown because of how utterly terrible Paris is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_syndrome
Shoplifting seems very vulnerable to equilibrium effects -- that is, if the rate of shoplifting goes up then either targeted businesses fail or they engage in some form of costly mitigation.
If you walked into a chain retailer near me in 2019, hardly anything was locked up -- just a few high value, small items like razor blades or electronics. Now they lock up half the products in the store. The CVS near me locks up the pints of ice cream. That's costly and annoying for them and costs sales, but it probably works so you end up with businesses and customers suffering but the shoplifting stats don't reflect it.
Regarding homelessness, I don't think your summary of "up 25% from generational lows, and equal to the 1990s" is accurate, at least not for large and salient metros.
For example, there is data on the NYC shelter population going back to 1983: https://www.coalitionforthehomeless.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/NYC-Homeless-Shelter-Population-Worksheet-1983-Present50.pdf
Since 1983, the NYC shelter population has increased from about 13,000 to over 90,000 today, about a 7x increase, while the overall city population has grown about 25%.
Looking at the Seattle sweep data you posted, if we take the frequency of sweeps as an (admittedly imperfect) proxy for the amount of homelessness (or at least how much of a visible problem it is, prompting the sweeps), there were 29 sweeps in 2008 (the earliest year in chart you linked to), and 2196 in 2023 (the most recent year). This is probably an over-estimate of the actual increase in homelessness, but it does point to something (much) larger than a 25% increase from generational lows.
This is more in line with people's reported experiences and anecdotal evidence. There are many credible reports of large homeless encampments in towns and cities where homelessness was almost unheard of in the past.
That's a great point and also tracks NYC's own official data (I'm not sure where the comptroller's report gets the "120,000" figure, since their own stats for that period seem to hover a little less than 100,000, but it is also possible that they are including a second data set from somewhere other than traditional shelters)- https://comptroller.nyc.gov/services/for-the-public/charting-homelessness-in-nyc/overview/
Not sure where Claude is pulling numbers from but that seems misleading at best.
To augment #4, I would think that the measuring of disorder is going to lag behind the ways that development of disorder manifest themselves.
We note that littering is down. But there is a stronger social stigma today against littering (brought around by public campaigns against it) that was not present mid century. So, should we take the W? Well, I'm not sure if that's a success story of reducing disorder versus playing whack-a-mole with various forms of disorder.
Smoking is much reduced from that time period. Is that because of a general increase in public healthy behaviors or a specific campaign? My suspicion is the latter.
If you asked someone in 1980 what signs of disorder were, they probably wouldn't have mentioned encampments in city parks. But today, we all recognize that as a sign of disorder.
That doesn't mean that disorder hasn't decreased, but it's hard to demonstrate that by pointing to yesterday's fashionable forms of disorder. To look at the other examples, it would be like saying traffic is reduced because there aren't as many horses on the streets.
I worked retail security once, at a store in a bad neighborhood. The shrink was ~5%, as compared to ~1.5% nationwide. It's absolutely possible that certain stores in SF have a vastly higher shoplifting rate compared to the national average, as well as trends that don't match the national average trends. It's also possible that people will highlight such stores when talking about crime, while ignoring the broader trends.
The actual disorder around here I wish the police would do something more about is crazy people wandering around shouting aggressively. Most of the homeless people around here seem fine, and I don't see drug stuff being left around, but there's a few crazy angry ones who go shouting (either at people or at nothing in particular) and who probably ought to be charged with disturbing the peace or something...
Theory Four is incredibly compelling to me. The more I learn about the past the more I realize that most people have completely garbage intuitions for what the past was actually like. I hit up the excellent Storyville Museum in New Orleans recently and it's incredible how much people romanticize horrible things. Heck, I saw the premiere of Paradise Square in Berkeley, the whole musical is just a complete romanticization of the worst slum in NYC. I'm pretty sure you've written in your old blog about the prevalance of domestic terrorism in the 70s and it's barely a blip in people's consciousnesses now. I even read somewhere a compelling argument that 21st century Americans' impressions about the 50s and 60s are based more on sitcoms (which obviously had to be squeaky clean and network approved) than actual real life.
In Back to the Future, the clean idyllic and colourful world of the 1950s is contrasted against the dark, grimy, crime-ridden world of the "present" 1980s.
But now we make nostalgia films about the 1980s and the 1980s is clean, idyllic and colourful.
These data actually justified the Back to the Future. 1950 seems like quite a local minima for some reason.
The blogger "agnostic" had a series at GNXP tagged as "previous generations were more depraved" https://www.gnxp.com/blog/labels/previous%20generations%20were%20more%20depraved.php showing much more criminal & reckless the 80s were. Then when he created his own blog, he started complaining about how the declining crime of the modern era made it culturally lamer than the 80s. I used to comment there to criticize his posts, but he started holding all comments for his approval to let through or not and eventually declared a limit of one per post https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2021/07/13/a-comment-agnostic-has-not-let-through-under-his-post-on-elite-overproduction/ He embraced a lot of kooky populism, and was dead certain that Biden couldn't beat Trump even if he cheated because some theory of historical cycles required Trump to start a new counter-Reagan era (he eventually changed his mind to declare that Trump was more of a McKinley/Carter figure and some left-populist after him must kick off the new era).
Any stats coming out of California are suspect beyond belief. They, and other blue states, have no incentive to be truthful. Where I live crime has gone up a great deal. And they lie about it.
The issue with both this, and the previous, analysis is this:
You are comparing levels to what they used to be, rather than to what they would have been in that time period if they had the technology we have today.
If somebody shoplifted in the 1990s, you might have a grainy black and white recording of the act which might or might not allow you to actually identify the person, and maybe a witness who might be able to identify somebody in a lineup IF you can luck out and find the person who did it - certainly not enough to identify and find them. If somebody stole a package from your porch, you almost certainly didn't have a recording. A certain level of crime was accepted, not because the crime was acceptable, but because there wasn't a realistic way of catching the criminals in the act of committing any given crime; rather, the expectation was that they'd slip up and get caught sooner or later.
Whereas today, it is basically routine in many places to catch people in the act of committing crimes with high-definition video that affirmatively identifies the person and the crime itself, and then for the government to do nothing about it. -This- is what most of the right-wing commentary is focusing on, and this represents a far greater level of perceptible civil disorder than an apparently identical level of crime which exists because of a lack of evidence rather than a lack of enforcement.
The problem isn't necessarily that shoplifting, or other crimes, have gone up relative to some point in the past, but that crime is significantly more common than there is any reason for.
You're saying two things:
1. we directly perceive more crime (because we have better surveillance equipment)
2. the government does less about it (despite more evidence produced by the better surveillance equipment)
If both those things were true, I agree it would at least be evidence of the government becoming incompetent, which one might reasonably argue is a sign of civil disorder.
(1) on its own would be more viable as an argument that perceptions of increased crime are incorrect; that crime has actually stayed the same or gone down, just increased visibility creates the illusion it has gone up.
(2) is an empirical claim, though I'm not sure if good data exists for it. Still, you made the claim--maybe you have good data for it?
I would say, rather, that the government does about the same about it (hence the rates staying relatively stable over time), it's just that reasons for low government investment in dealing with the problems no longer stand up to scrutiny. This may or may not represent increasing incompetence, but it certainly represents more visible incompetence.
But no, I don't have good data for it, only an ever-increasing hill, soon to be a mountain, of anecdotal evidence.
It's a little insensitive to wish death on boom box carriers after what happened to Radio Raheem.
Nothing is stopping them enjoying music. I use a pair of wireless earbuds like most civilized people.
He's a fictional character, not hurt by our lack of sensitivity to him (on top of being dead).
I think the decline of public order is distinct from crime, sometimes it gets cheered on, as when people celebrate graffiti artists. One big difference between the present and the old days is that nobody criticizes anyone else’s bad behavior in public any more. I’m not sure how to turn that around.
Curious what kinds of bad behavior you're referring to specifically, and whether you personally criticize people doing those behaviors in public.
All the stuff Scott mentions, the only thing I call out is people listening to loud videos on their phone indoors. Some people react with surprise as if they didn’t think they could be heard at the next table.
An explanation Scott doesn't consider is that people confuse levels with rates of change, observe that crime or graffiti or trash are high, meaning higher than they should be, and conclude that they are rising. You see that pattern in views on inflation. People observe that prices are high, describe that as high inflation, even if the increase occurred in the past and prices are not currently rising.
1. One easy answer to why so many people think that crime in the US is going up is that it is, at least on the sorts of timescales on which people remember. It's true that crime is down on a year-by-year basis, but the last five years have had much higher crime than the five years before, and it's perfectly reasonable that normal people without their noses buried in statistics are going to notice the five-year increase without noticing the one-year decrease.
2. I think absolute quantity of disorder is less annoying than official tolerance of disorder. If bad stuff is happening and the authorities are doing their best to quell it then that's not too outrageous, but if bad stuff is happening and the authorities have given up trying to do anything about it, or have decided that bad thing is Good Actually and you're a bad person for complaining about it, then that's more outrageous. The US in my experience doesn't have exceptionally high levels of disorder but it does have exceptionally high levels of official tolerance of disorder.
I think you're off base here: "... This feels wrong to me: people aren’t comparing the present to the golden age of 2019, they’re comparing it to the golden age of their parents and grandparents’ generation. So let’s take a longer view..."
Everyone I know IS comparing the present to 2019, at least in NYC.
Disorder is way up in New York, especially in my nabe which is an expensive part of Manhattan.
Drug dealers, addicts passed out (or dead) on the streets, scary crazy people, etc were virtually unknown where I live prior to the Summer of Love Riots in 2020.
Shoplifting is likely down not because of a decrease in desire or the crimminal population, but that everything of value is locked up. In major retailers you push a button, hear the announcement over the PA and hope someone shows up to give you access to bandaids or whatever.
In additiion, some retailers have security near the entrance, including an armed guard (sometimes an off duty cop).
I've known more than a few people involved in assaults and exactly zero of them reported anything to the police. These were people trained in martial arts and they won their fights (or got away) and felt the cops couldn't (or wouldn't) do anything and so didn't bother.
I have never encountered the word "nabe" before. Is there an official distinction between a "nabe" and a "hood"?
A "nabe" is gentrified. A "hood" is yet to be.
In Tokyo, everything is a suicide. A man gets mugged, and dies of a bullet wound. Obvious suicide, because he was suddenly impoverished and unable to take care of his family.
Suicide, in general, is at about triple the rate of homicide, and that'll hide a good number of bodies.
In America, can we really be sure that anything less visible than a bullet wound is ruled a murder? You haven't bothered to collect dark-web statistics on "claimed assassinations." And enough of them are either ruled "death by natural causes" or suicide to fox the numbers.
Is it just that "Industrial/Political Murder" has gotten more subtle? When a failed political operative winds up floating in the reflecting pool, it gets called suicide, doesn't it?
In America, pretty much every death of someone under 75 and not already being treated for something likely to kill them, gets an autopsy. The exact rules differ from state to state, but it will be something like that. And it's really, really hard to fake a murder in a way that the coroner won't pretty much immediately peg as a murder. Everything you can come up with, they as a community have seen a thousand times and turned it into a checklist item.
So, yes, we can be pretty sure we are getting approximately all of the murders.
First off, you don't know much about poisons. Start with Rolemaster, there's never something they don't do a comprehensive "here's the basics" on.
An autopsy is VERY DIFFERENT from a full autopsy. Have a drink with a coroner and get 'em to tell you the difference.
It's not really hard to fake a death from natural causes, using a variety of poisons. Hell, you can even get someone's balls to rot off, and STILL get it called "natural causes" (probably need someone in prison, mind you, but still!).
A comedian died less than a year ago, "peacefully in his sleep" -- after having suffered blunt trauma to the back of the head. Let's see, do you think they investigated that for murder? No, no they did not.
Aw, hell. That's two different comedians (Trevor death's a few years older, mind). Ya still wanna say they weren't murdered? Ya sure? Awful coincidental, don't it be?
There are numerous claimed "natural causes" or suicide deaths that are actually claimed, on the darkweb, as murders/assassinations. Navalny may ring a bell? Coroner says he died of one thing, America's now claiming he died of something legitimately weird, odd, and not particularly fitting of the Russian MO. Mind you, the day after he died, his wife was giving a "moving speech" to a Security Conference. A prewritten speech.
What are the names of those two comedians? And for what motive do you suppose they were murdered?
Trevor Moore and Bob Saget. I'm not saying they were murdered (Although Bob Saget's family did not help by saying he died "sleeping peacefully." Generally when people say "died instantly in a car crash" they don't mean it, either, but at least that's a well known lie.)
But when you listen to enough "natural causes" deaths, watch enough critical personnel die, you don't close the door so easily.
I don't think that many die of bullet wounds in Japan.
I still think the main reason is priming. The tolerance for crime and disorder is lowering with the development of society, so "crime and disorder rate feels higher" means "... feels much higher than it should be".
I can't really compare to my own youth because I grew up in communism, and there crime was way lower for various reasons.
Quick take on the vibes:
If you step outside Lighthaven and start walking north towards one of the restaurants near the UC Berkeley campus, you will pass multiple hobos on the sidewalk over about a five-block walk.
For someone walking down this stretch of sidewalk, there is a big jump discontinuity in the vibes when going from 0 hobos to 1 hobo. Going from 1 -> 2 hobos is less of a vibe change, even though the number of hobos has technically doubled. Going from 2 -> 4 hobos is also not as much of a worsening in the vibes, even though the number has doubled again. (The vibe worsens with more hobos, but not nearly as much as it does when going from 0 to 1.)
So even if the number of hobos on the sidewalk decreases from, say, 5 down to 2 (a 60% drop) the vibes have not improved by all that much. There are still hobos. You still feel unsafe.
There can also be an element of "grunginess" in an environment that isn't strictly litter or graffiti. For example, if there are cracks in the sidewalk. The concrete is dirty and dark grey, and covered in black chewing gum spots. And again, as with the hobos, there's a step change from going from zero litter to a little bit of litter, and not as much to go from a little to a lot of litter.
Loved this post and the one yesterday! I particularly love the potential reason for it that you put at the end of the list on yesterday's post (that maybe crime rates are going down because all the people who would be doing crimes are sitting at home watching tiktok videos, browsing instagram, or playing video games instead. I don't have data to back this up, but this really rings true to me. I would actually not be surprised at all if this is a major cause of crime rates going down.
I also totally agree that crime and the kinds of small-time disorderliness that bother me have gone down over recent years.
And I definitely don't like feeling despair all the time. (I do kind of think another activity that has replaced some old-fashioned disorderliness in young people (replaced drinking, smoking, driving recklessly, having unprotected sex, vandalism, etc) is despair. I think a lot of people are not doing disorderly things because instead they are sitting at home despairing and contemplating suicide, and that's terrible.)
However, I do think there are some kinds of disorder that have gone up a lot in the past twenty years. For example:
- Number of felonies the president elect has been convicted of on the day they were elected has gone up drastically in the past decade.
- Federal government deporting immigrants from one country to a mega-prison in another country without any kind of due process is, uh. I don't know if this used to happen more, but I certainly didn't hear about anything like this. (Though this might be just a thing of "we now hear about more crimes".)
About 80% of Republicans support deporting undocumented immigrants to El Salvadorean prison without due process https://prri.org/spotlight/new-prri-poll-six-in-ten-americans-oppose-exporting-undocumented-immigrants-to-foreign-prisons-without-due-process/
- And there's the UHC CEO shooter. Like I have no love for UHC or its CEO (I heard it was one of the worst health insurance companies for unethically denying claims and that its then CEO was a large part of the reason for this. I have no idea whether this is true, but even if it is), but like, the swell of support for him being gunned down in the street feels... Kinda disorderly?
- Measles vaccination rates have gone down and measles rates have gone up in the US in the past three years. A lot. And okay, I am comparing to the halcyon days of 2020 when I say that (there was measles everywhere in 1960), but I think a lot has actually happened in the past 20 years that is disorderly and isn't just about comparing 2026 to the halcyon days of 2020. Like there's just more confusion. And of course being confused is better than being confidently wrong, so I'm not saying confusion itself is a bad thing, but it is disorderly, right?
(For my first 3 points, I guess what I'm saying is, they are isolated crimes (whatever President Trump was convicted of, the deportation to CECOT, and the UHC CEO shooting), but it's the level of support for those crimes that feel disorderly. I had to drive by multiple "I'm Voting for the Convicted Felon" flags on my way to work every day, and that felt very disorderly to me.)
Focusing on a small piece here but- why are we still using graffiti as a proxy for crime (edit: or disorder)? The bay is full of gorgeous murals that were made by kids who once had their fun by tagging things. Making their clumsy mark on the world, then growing up and making their city beautiful.
Obviously tagging the wrong place (active storefront) is obnoxious and costly, but it feels wrong to sit in an ivory tower and use the statistics on that as a proxy for social decay. For a lot of cities, especially towards the outskirts, graffiti is a welcome sight
What percentage of graffiti would you say is beautiful art that improves the neighborhood? Also, how many of those beautiful murals are actually graffiti, meaning put in place without the consent of the building owner?
A person who puts a beautiful painting on my car without my consent is still a vandal.
Most graffiti isnt beautiful, and none of the murals are graffiti. But i moreso meant that the artists responsible for that art often have graffiti in their history.
But like- to try and stay on topic- The thumbnail of this post is a random concrete door in what appears to be maybe a desolate alleyway or some other urban liminal space.
It looks like the PERFECT place to do this. And in practice, this is where graffiti often lives, at least in my city- under bridges, on run down or unkempt property, etc.
Vandalism would be a better metric. Some graffiti is indeed vandalism but not all of it, or at least not in a way that meaningfully indicates "disorder"
Isn't the answer on both of these questions just the US population is a lot older than it used to be (https://www.statista.com/statistics/241494/median-age-of-the-us-population/) so you get a lot less crime and a lot more nostalgia/fear of crime?
Two other forms of disorder that I've experienced: street harassment of people challenging me to fights and panhandlers looking more mentally disturbed. These won't show up in crime stats because I change my behavior to avoid getting into those fights, but that's still a tax on me.
Could another factor be increased travel since the 1960s? Nowadays people are more likely to have visited a city or country where approximately none of this disorder happens, and their familiar amount of disorder seems large in comparison? Even if it’s only some fraction of people who have traveled and noticed this, those people could influence the overall vibes.
I feel like public life is just dumpier these days in a way that gives people a negative feeling, and they take out that negative feeling on the homeless.
Service workers are frequently rude and unprofessional. A lot of businesses feel like ghost towns. People walking by you on the street seem withdrawn and cold: nobody is friendly. Dress standards in public have gone down. Cities pursue maintenance projects in a way that seems apathetic to antagonistic towards how the public receives them. People are just holistically antisocial and are glued to their phones a lot.
Because of this, when I spend a lot of time in broader society, I just get the vague feeling that society is dumpy and trashy in a way that did not used to be the case. Therefore, when I see a homeless person, this feels like the ultimate confirmation of this prior. What my brain is picking up on is something broader than just 'homeless people', but if I was a less self-aware person, I could see myself thinking that what I feel in public was just 'too much disorder', and not something broader than this.
If public spaces felt brighter, more social, and more connected, graffiti and crazy homeless people would be easier to tolerate. In the current status quo, a lot of public life is already pretty sucky outside of disorder, so seeing graffiti, homeless people, and litter pushes it over the edge.
There's a recurring point that pops up, at least in reference to NYC, that a ~10% subset of the homeless population are "super-perpetrators" that commit ~90% of the violations by the homeless population as a whole. This does hit to disorder versus crime, but also begs the question of whether the visibility of a crime should be measured in some way. Statistics are great and often our best way of evaluating issues on any level above one's own personal experience, but they are not without blind spots. Someone defecating by an underpass near the city limits is different from someone doing so in Times Square.
I don't how aggregate stats on this shake out over the last two decades, but I can say that the last 2-3 years have had a number of incidents with naked or semi-naked vagrants screaming, defecating, or passed out on a subway platform. A number of high-traffic stations have permanent/semi-permanent encampments on the platform, with zonked-out derelicts surrounded by litter (not talking about the unlicensed vendors or beggars).
This is not representative of my experience for the preceding two decades or so. There have always been folks asleep in the subway cars and everyone has had the lurching horror of seeing an empty subway car roll up in an otherwise packed train and wondering whether it's a broken AC or a vagrant with the kind of BO you can cut with a knife. But this seems qualitatively different. You don't need a homeless population in the thousands if the same dozen or so individuals keep shitting on the escalator where 100k people commute every morning. This isn't local color. This isn't how it used to be. And stats pointing out that there are fewer piles of garbage bags on the street don't hit the root of the matter when you see a soiled bedsheet flapping around someone's turd in midtown on a midweek afternoon.
Disorder is easy to map. It's the destruction of family, and I mean F is for Family. I mean, you don't even really GET the comedy about family anymore. National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. How you got a cousin who's a walking embarrassment, but he's your cousin so you put up with hit.
Hypothesis: what if public disorder, its harms and/or its perceptions, scale with population size? That is, perhaps we should be looking at absolute numbers and not normalizing it per capita. If the population size quadruples and graffiti rates halve per capita, there will be twice as much graffiti around. Same with littering, or boombox carriers, or harassing psychos on the train. You will be less likely to be the personal target of a crime that only affects one person, but you will be more likely to be witness incidents that have audiences, because there are more people causing incidents to wider audiences.
This wouldn't do much to explain short-term effects from 2020 to 2025, but would explain long-term effects, and unfortunately make them mostly unsolvable unless you're a NIMBY.
Maybe the discussion about crime is really about social atomisation.
It's not exactly a secret that life today is very atomised by historical standards -- more people with few or no friends, a greater expectation that you'll move from place to place as your career demands, weaker civil society, fewer extended families, etc. If you don't know the people you come across in your day-to-day life (so everyone is an unknown, and therefore potentially hostile, quantity), and you don't have a meaningful family/friend support network to fall back on, it's not surprising that you should feel a heightened sense of danger, even if this isn't statistically justified. Conversely, if you live in one of ye olde tight-knit communities, where you know basically everyone (at least by sight) and, if you do become a victim of crime, your parents/brother/cousin/friends will be there to help you out, you'll likely feel more at ease.
The obvious theory to me: Conservatives are seen as 'tough on crime' and rely on the narrative that crime and disorder are all around us, we're in a period of conservative backlash against liberals/progressives (especially in this/Scott's media ecosystem, I suspect), therefore lots of people report high crime and disorder.
Part of the problem with a two-party system is that everything ends up getting correlated and identified with one side or the other. And part of the problem with polarized, high-political-engagement times is that everyone thinks about the world in political terms.
For things people have direct personal knowledge and experience about, they can sometimes manage to believe their own lying eyes over the narratives that signal allegiance to their ideology and tribe.
But for people who have not been the victim of a crime and have no direct personal access to the statistics other than reading about them, to people who spend their lives online and don't go outside often enough to get a good statistical sample of how much 'disorder' there is in the first place: ideological adherence is absolutely sufficient (I claim) to explain the general perception.
Further evidence: I'm (imprecisely binned as) a progressive, and I don't think crime or disorder are up at all, nor that they're pressing problems for most people.
A bunch of people in this comment thread and the preceding one have noted "well I lived in big city X and directly experienced or witnessed the following string of crimes" and a bunch of others have noted the opposite. The plural of these anecdotes is that America has a lot of crime, but not an overwhelming and omnipresent amount and individual results may vary. People don't experience aggregates, they experience "I tried living in city Y and every few months someone stole my bike or broke into my car or took my package or tried to fight me as I was walking home from work, and this seems sub-optimal as a way to run a big city." Or "I lived in city Z and nothing bad happened, guess everything is OK." But if lots of people have the first experience it suggests we still have a problem to solve even if aggregates are less bad than before.
Theory: this is generalized future anxiety, cashing out in post-hoc rationalizations. It has increased because the future is becoming less predictable, not because the present sucks.
When people can see on their screens or in real life the level of orderliness in huge metropolises in Asia, in say Japan, Korea, China, what they get at home seems like a miserable policy failure even if things are better than they were 30 years ago in the same way if a neighboring country electrified while your country was still in the dark you’d think something has gone very wrong even if life was 20% better than the past.
People have bad intuitions for change over time but are fairly decent at invidious comparisons in the present. People *want* to have Japan levels of public orderliness and the fact it exists in real life in huge cities makes them incredulous regarding explanations as to why it’s impossible to achieve here, and don’t find “well it’s better than before” a compelling substitute.
Other theory: People are dissatisfied with order and with their increasingly regulated lives. They don't understand how this can be the case since they consider social order the greatest good. So their dissatisfaction must be due to disorder or crime leading to more clinging to order leading to more dissatisfaction leading to more suppression of deviance leading to more order leading to more dissatisfaction.
My thought relates to Putnam’s Bowling Alone book from 2000.
People don’t go out as much as they once did. Therefore they rely on media stories about various disorder categories. If it bleeds it leads.
You see this in lots of areas. My finances are good but other’s are bad. I don’t see homeless people but they’re everywhere. Most live in safe, clean suburbs but see awful things happening every day on the internet.
> People don’t go out as much as they once did. Therefore they rely on media stories about various disorder categories
How do we know that people don't go out as much as they once did? Should we be any more trustful of the "that people don't go out as much as they once did" narrative than the "crime keeps going up" narrative?
Attendance at church services are down, lodges and clubs are disappearing, movie theaters are failing. Golf courses are disappearing. Most people can’t name the person 3 houses away. Teens having less sex. Lots of pointers in that direction.
We do know. People report MUCH more time spent at home watching screens vs spending time away from home with friends.
This feels wrong to me: people aren’t comparing the present to the golden age of 2019, they’re comparing it to the golden age of their parents and grandparents’ generation. So let’s take a longer view.
When I see people making the argument that crime really is up they mostly do in fact seem to be describing recent trends. Esp re shoplifting.
If they are in fact comparing to their parents and grandparents time, they are just making uninformed guesses. If something new is happening here it would be why do ppl feel like they can correctly make this comparison.
Put me in the camp of "of course things are better and the stats agree what are any of you even talking about" but maybe SF just really sucks
During the Iraq war I heard and really liked the song "eve of destruction" but then thought of the absurdity of replaying a doom predicting song to a situation 40 years after its release.
Isn't this a function of the spread of anti-theft devices in shops? I personally don't know how common shoplifting is but I can tell how often they've got those plastic barriers and I need to ask the staff just to buy some toilet paper and beer - and if I see those in every shop today where I didn't before, then I assume that shoplifting rates are going to the moon
This street-lights the issues where there's a good body of data to analyze. But perhaps it tends to be the very issues where there is not a good way to collect data, where the issue is hardest to correct and people feel these in the vibes.
> (I support the death penalty for boom box carriers)
I understand this statement is hyperbole made in jest, and I even agree with the broader sentiment (loud music in public places makes it difficult for me to think or speak, both things I would rather have the freedom to do), but I cannot help but point out that it's possible someone acting in bad faith could accuse you of racism for this statement alone, for the following reason:
Do The Right Thing (1989) is a fairly well known movie directed by Spike Lee (SPOILERS AHEAD) in which a black character, Radio Raheem, is seen carrying a boom box blasting "Fight the Power" by Public Enemy through the streets of New York, culminating in an altercation at a pizzeria where the owner destroys his boom box, a fight breaks out, the police are called, and Radio Raheem is ultimately choked to death by a white cop. After this, the main character, Mookie (played by Spike Lee himself), throws a trash can through the window of the pizzeria, causing a riot in which the pizzeria burns down but nobody is shown to be killed. Many other things happen in the movie but that's the main plot.
The title of the film is in reference to the trash can being thrown, and the film is deliberately ambiguous about whether Mookie "did the right thing" (with the small caveat that Spike Lee claims only white people ever ask him that question), but crystal clear that Radio Raheem should not have died as a result of the events that led up to the riot.
I am not accusing you of racism for being ignorant of this film or its implications. I wasn't aware of it myself until quite recently; I said "fairly well known" earlier as a general statement, since the film has had a lasting legacy, as evidenced by it having been screened at my local cinema in current year. I just wanted to warn you that you might want to be careful with statements like the one above, which I could see particularly vindictive journalists or other pundits latching on to as a reason to criticize your worldview.
OK, I’ve been ruminating about racism for a while and you’ve triggered an avalanche. But I will try to keep it small.
Sometimes a group of people develop a passionate hatred of another group, and feel their hatred to be so appropriate that it justifies committing atrocities against the group, including exterminating them. That phenomenon is a terrible evil, and if racism is thinking and behaving that way towards people of another race, I am absolutely in favor of aggressively calling out racists, outing them, ejecting them from groups and fucking smacking them in the face. But I do not think that having some quite negative thoughts about something members of a certain group do more frequently than other people, or having a certain aversion to members of a group is abnormal, or the product of grotesquely screwed up thinking, or extremely evil.
I have probably entertained negative thoughts about every group there is, and I definitely have had negative thoughts and felt at least mild aversion toward members of every single goddam group you are not supposed to have those reactions to: blacks, gays, trans people, disabled people, women. Am I leaving out any group I am supposed to open my heart to and view in a way that is judgment-free? Name one, and I guarantee you I have looked at members of that group and thought “yuck.”
It is natural to experience that state of mind regarding people who are noticeably different from oneself. All animals are neophobic, and we are no exception. Furthermore, part of identity is cultural affiliation, and part of cultural affiliation is a feeling that people not of one’s culture are weird and/or inferior. On top of that, people of other cultures are harder to read, so it is easy to develop an inaccurate picture of them. Generally, getting to know some members of the unfamiliar group makes many of my dumb, simplistic negative takes on the group fade away. Until that happens, the best I have been able to do is to remind myself energetically of the illusions that are probably clouding my judgment. I am pretty sure that the personal reactions I'm describing are very common. I'm inclined to think they are almost universal.
I am rarely out in the city these days, and do not know whether blacks blast boom boxes more often than non-blacks. But let’s say Scott’s irritated mental movies about people blasting boom boxes almost always feature a black guy as the culprit. Why is that so terrible? Why is it terrible even if it’s inaccurate and nowadays whites, blacks, hispanics and asians are equally represented among boom box blasters? Do you really believe your own spontaneous mental movies represent situations with perfect accuracy and fairness? Do you really think anybody’s do? I am pretty sure that if Scott was writing a piece where race was tangentially involved he would watch own mind for dumb takes that were set off by negative images of blacks with boom boxes, black pimps in movies, whatever. He would do a good job of straining out his own race-related bullshit in formulating his take. I am pretty sure that Scott listens to his black patients as attentively as he does his white ones. I am pretty sure that if Scott came upon someone black who had just been injured in a hit and run he would feel compassion and do his best to help the person. And things of that kind are what you can reasonably expect from real people.
This world where good people never feel aversion or fear or disapproval for strutting young black males with blasting boom boxes, nose-picking people with developmental disability, beefy gay men in drag, etc etc does not exist. It’s a piece of nonsense, like the world of The Sound of Music.
I don't disagree with anything you've said. In fact, given that Do The Right Thing shows multiple black characters blasting boom boxes and no white characters doing so, viewers may come out of it with that association being stronger rather than weaker. It's a complicated movie with moral grey areas that I oversimplified to make my point, which is that I could see a potential argument in favor of negatively interpreting Scott's words through a racist lens. I think that's a bad faith take as I've said, and I did not mean to imply anything about aspiring toward a "perfect" worldview in which cognitive bias doesn't exist, although I see now how my words may have inadvertently nudged in that direction.
Well, the part of what you said that I disagree with is that you seem to think it is a good idea to steer clear of anything that woke nitwits could call racism. I think it is better to go ahead and say or write the thing that is going to make the woke peanut gallery squeal and bring out the handcuffs, and then say your own version of what I wrote above.
Technical glitch; I meant my statement below as a reply to you.
Which is why I advised Scott to be careful. I didn't outright say not to make such statements, and the intent of my original post was to provide context should Scott find himself in a position where he needs to defend that statement.
If that quote is "racist", then perhaps it's time to stop pretending that the word matters any more. People can hurl whatever baseless insults they want, it doesn't matter because Scott has more clout than them.
Have you considered looking at this from a revealed preference angle? Maybe we could see if the spending habits of profit-maximizing firms could provide a better thermometer than crime statistics. When there is a conflict between the vibes and the data, look at the market behavior. There are some early data points that seem compelling to me:
According to https://capitaloneshopping.com/research/shoplifting-statistics - Between 2019 and 2023, 69% of retailers increased their use of merchandise-locking cages, cases, or hooks. In 2023, 75% of retailers added or increased uniformed security officers, and 67% added measures to lock or secure merchandise. From 2019 to 2023, 64% of retailers added positions within their loss prevention teams, and 42% increased budgets for third-party security officers.
https://www.asisonline.org/security-management-magazine/latest-news/today-in-security/2025/november/external-retail-theft/ suggests: for exterior security alone (lighting, cameras, license plate readers) 61% of retailers increased these measures in 2024, with 57% planning further increases over the next 18 months.
Maybe some data sets that would be helpful: total loss-prevention operating expenditure as a percentage of revenue, broken out by metro area, over 10-15+ years. I don't think this exists, the closest proxy might be publicly traded security firms whose revenue growth by segment could serve as a rough proxy (if retail security guard contracts are growing faster than commercial or residential, it could mean something).
To steelman / consider alternative explanations:
- Deterrence tech has gotten far cheaper. AI camera systems, RFID tags, etc. are all getting down a steep cost curve. A $50k system might cost $10k now.
- Political cover exists for something they have always wanted to do. Post-2020 theft narrative has let them take action to capture new profit and close stores that had lower margins.
- Self-checkout might be the real driver. If a big chunk of the increased LP spend is actually about self-checkout loss, then the locked cases we see might be solving a different problem. Visible security could be a response to a back-office inventory problem vs. a street-level disorder problem.
- Insurance and liability requirements: maybe insurers are demanding theft deterrent as a condition of coverage, or the litigation environment around employee safety during theft incidents has changed. 73% of retailers reporting "increased aggression during theft events" might change that liability calculus.
- Contagion and arms-race: once Target locks up detergent, shoplifters move on to the next store: redistribution of theft means each store's individual decision to invest in deterrence is rational, but in aggregate reflects the same amount of theft just sloshing around.
It’s easy to note that crime and disorder trends are not evenly distributed. A doubling of the murder rate in a city’s safest neighborhood is unlikely to register, and commentators to this discussion would not notice the direction of crime in ghettos that they never have reason to be present in. A plausible hypothesis is that a higher sense of disorder in contrast to the statistics relates to two types of troublesome areas. One is clearly the business districts across the country which hyperbolically seem to have more homeless people than suits due to wfh. Here areas are depressing and certainly give an impression of rot. The other areas are the ‘edge’ neighborhoods- those places that border higher crime areas but that tend to draw gentrifying young, culture, bars, restaurants due to reasonable rents. When crime shot up driving Covid, these neighborhoods faced a novel situation and a shock, resulting in large disinvestment and empty storefronts post the big crime spillover from bad neighborhoods. These neighborhoods in my city have not recovered. Taking a step back, these are areas suburbanites and local urbanites were used to visiting and often are avatars for the health of a city. And now they are much worse.
The disconnect between frequency and perception might dissolve if you measure disorder not as incident count but as the energy cost of processing divergent descriptions of shared space.
Three things can make disorder feel worse even when incidents decline:
(1) the institutional maintenance of shared baselines erodes — postwar public order was an actively funded achievement, not a default, and when the funding declined the expectation persisted as cultural memory while the infrastructure supporting it decohered;
(2) gentrification moved people with sharply peaked expectations of public space into environments that violate those expectations, raising the per-encounter processing cost even at constant frequency;
(3) the technology for imposing involuntary coordination demands on strangers improved (better speakers, smartphones broadcasting on transit) while social norms against confrontation weakened the tools for resisting those demands.
People aren't miscounting incidents. They're accurately reporting that the cost of maintaining their own description of normal in public space has gone up.
How much of this is connected to aging population? Not only in the "less crime prone young men" way, but also in the "when I was young" and "young people these days"sense?
It's not some great mystery. People's "lived experience" is not their lived experience, it's cable news, Facebook, TikTok. People are gorging themselves on media experiences that make them feel bad and then looking for epistemic reasons to tell themselves that this is reality and not something they can just stop subjecting themselves to.
I also think that’s a very important part of it.
Theory 5: Crime has long been used in America to stoke racist fears and manufacture public support for increased policing as well as other policies that hurt the working class. Hence, a media-landscape serving bourgeois interests (whether directly such as Bezos owning the Washington Post, or indirectly such as Alex Jones gaining sales money from "Support Your Local Ice Raids" T-shirts) is invested in perpetuating the fear of crime.
It may be an example of European influence on American beliefs. Europe really is less safe and more messy now than it was in the relatively recent past. And also, there is in both Europe and the US a general feeling that things are not going in the right direction. This too can influence crime perceptions
>Finally, theory four: the squalor and disorder of the past took different forms than the squalor and disorder of the present.
Mostly that. A lot of things that are considered antisocial todays were absolutely the norm in the 60's-80's: throwing garbage by your car's window, smoking inside, etc. Then it stopped being something normal that everyone did, and instead became disorder that antisocial people did. It may have been cut by a factor of 10, but the disorder aspect went from non-existent to "all of it".
Thinking of the recent trend of locking goods up in retail stores, pharmacy and other store closures in SF, the drug action around city hall, and the growing homeless problem despite enormous (useless) increase in spending to address the problem.
I know it's not the point but:
- 200dB is so loud it would kill you to hear it.
- 200dB is so loud that in normal atmospheric conditions it is beyond the point at which the rarefaction segment is a perfect vacuum (194dB); once a perfect vacuum is hit a louder sound can't happen.
- The stereo you heard was probably only 150dB, about the limit which loud music fans can briefly tolerate music to exist.
There's definitely a major part of the trend due to cultural changes and especially the mixing of cultures that were previously separated.
For instance white/WASP-y American culture used to be *much* more conformist and focused on clean orderliness. Not universally of course (it's what the hippies were rebelling against), but -- my impression is that all across America, middle class strivers were seeking that form of security and order. Moving to the suburbs had a lot to do with that. Put those same subculture back in contact with rowdier subcultures, homelessness, drug epidemics, downtown sketchiness, media-driven narratives about epidemics of crime, etc.. And they get the impression that they are considerably less safe, because they're not as insulated anymore.
So I feel like the main mechanism in general of the perception change is 'increased heterogeneity'. Combine with homelessness and drug problems producing major categories of 'visible' crime (as opposed to, like white collar stuff that doesn't make anyone feel unsafe), and you get a general feeling of disorder that wasn't there before.
When I moved to San Francisco in 2021, in the span of about a year I personally saw a half dozen thefts at Walgreens. I don't spend a lot of time at Walgreens! So the fact I saw that many meant it was happening a LOT.
I found it pretty funny. Sad, but funny too, with the security guard helplessly following the person around as they stuffed things in their bag.
And then someone smashed our garage door opener to steal the battery.
Anyway, I know that crime is low here. I know the numbers. But I could understabd why the average person would see what I saw and ignore that it was the pandemic and everyone went crazy for three years and think that everything is terrible.
I could identify empirical trends of disorder using Google Street View data (2011-present) if someone gave a budget of e.g. $1000. Unfortunately, I don't have the capacity otherwise - would be interesting though!
Most shoplifting is noticed only by a few retail employees. When people complain about disorder as shoplifting, I expect they are complaining about 1: stores they visit locking items behind glass, 2: viral videos of brazen shoplifting where the thief makes no attempt to conceal that they are stealing. 1 could be a policy innovation rather than reflective of underlying rates but it makes people *feel* like theft is going up (they weren't locking things up last year, so it must have gotten worse). 2, we're never gonna get anything like hard data on this, but we've had the capacity to make viral videos for significantly longer than we have had viral videos of brazen shoplifting, it would be weird if it's been going on at the same rate for ages and we only recently started pointing cell phone cameras at it. 2 seems especially corrosive to the social order because everyone gets to see a thief acting as though there are no rules, which plants resentment in the minds of rule-followers, and larcenous ideas in the minds of less upstanding citizens.
Isn't there also an international comparison aspect to this? A lot more people have gone to East Asia, seen the clean and safe cities there, and realized that ours are really quite disorderly and dirty in comparison. Even if American cities are not worse in a trendline sense, they're a lot worse compared to the cities you now know about and have been to.
An alternative hypothesis for a rise in the disorder vibes: overall public space activity is down as people spend more time at home and on electronics. If physical crime/disorder stays roughly constant, but people spend much less time outdoors, then the disorder makes up a large fraction of the lived public experience.
So I grew up in a large Canadian city (so you can probably assume less crime/less disorder than an American city). My whole life I have always felt like the media covers crime/disorder disproportionate to my own lived experience. (I should note I am a large man which may be relevant to my lived experience.) But that's probably a more extreme thing in Canada, where our largest cities are notably safer than smaller cities but it's covered as if the biggest cites are the most dangerous. (Canadians think Toronto and Vancouver are the most dangerous but the most dangerous cities are all in the Prairies.)
A brief aside: Many years ago, I moved to a smaller city within the greater urban area where I grew up. I lived there for 5 years. While I lived there, everyone I worked with was scared of my home city despite the city we lived in having a much higher murder rate than my home (much larger) city.
Anyway, I wonder how much of this is perception, how much of this is related to the "lack of experience of the urban environment" for so many people. (What is the percentage of people who live in suburb-like conditions of single-family homes on low-traffic streets vs. "way downtown" where they will regularly encounter "disorder"?)
Here, people who live in the suburbs are sometimes terrified of taking the subway. This always surprises me no matter how many times I've heard it. I can assure you it's never been as dangerous here to take the subway as it has been, at times, to do so in some American cities. (I have taken the subway here my whole life.)
Here, we see homeless people all the time. (We have fewer encampments than we did a few years ago, though.) Back when we still lived close to downtown, we saw graffiti all the time. We don't hear the loud noise because there's so much of it that we tune it out (though less now that we live farther from downtown.) I don't commute currently but back when I commuted I got a daily dose of all of this. I am very used to it and it doesn't make me feel uncomfortable at all (whether or not it's bad).
In 2023, we went to Portland and San Francisco (I had been to neither, my partner had once been to SF many years ago). People here told us we were crazy as the media was covering these places as if they were really, truly dangerous. We never felt in danger. Portland was mostly fine, San Francisco was definitely far worse than here in terms of (visible) homelessness and litter (but American cities are almost always dirtier than Canadian cities). In Eureka we were told not to walk to the bar from our hotel but we did anyway. We saw "disorder" but it wasn't anything different than what we've seen in plenty of other cities in other countries when we've traveled.
But we live in a city, and have lived in cities for decades, including right downtown, and we travel to cities, some of which are considered significantly less safe than where we live. So, for us, this "disorder" is just different degrees of "city." Some are cleaner than others. Some have more homeless than others. (The worst I've noticed in the US in the last few years was Denver, actually.) Some of way more graffiti than others (and some have plenty of intentional graffiti that is just public art). Some are way noisier than others.
But if you spend all or most of your time in somewhat less urban areas without this stuff (or with way less), doesn't any of it feel alien? And I can't help but feel that the TV media does it's utter best to try to enhance this feeling every single broadcast by screaming about crime in cities.
I mentioned on the other thread that I had a credit card stolen and promptly used for fraud. That's a crime, and I did report it, on an online site provided by the county. AFAIK, nothing ever came of it. I took the effort of calling my credit card company, getting the card cancelled, and the payments reversed, which means the expense was probably shared between me, the company, and the various defrauded merchants. Some of this might ultimately wind up on the records of an insurance company, and might not be reported as crime.
There might be significant amounts of such fraud recorded by businesses, that doesn't show up as crime. I think it certainly counts for many people as disorder.
California famously passed Proposition 47 in 2014, which set a $950 limit on shoplifting being counted as a misdemeanor vs. a felony. This was widely reported as "legalizing shoplifting", often punctuated by phone videos of people literally breaking into retail store cases and making off with armloads of consumer goods. While it was clear that theft was happening, it was never clear whether this was before or after Prop47, whether the thieves were doing this specifically because they believed they'd get away with it now and would not have before, or even whether the thieves were caught. The presumption was that they all escaped and were likely to do it again later.
The apparent official intent of Prop47 was to prioritize prison time for crimes more serious than shoplifting. Taking this at face value, it still implies that prison space is scarce, which in turn suggests that crime is on the rise. It's also reasonable to assume that if shoplifting up to $950 carries a lighter penalty than before, then such shoplifters are less likely to be reported by people who believe they'll just go free, so people who witness it just let it go, but still register it as disorder. (See avalancheGenesis's comment elsewhere here.)
I recall reports of merchants shutting down businesses because they would not be able to afford the losses, but no concrete examples. (I might have known of some if I were a resident of California, but I'm not.) Shutting down a business isn't a crime, but if it happens because of potential crime, I think it does count as disorder. The same applies if businesses stay open but have to put more goods behind glass walls, bars on their windows, and so on.
The social media effect means I know about thefts in California that probably would not reach me in prior decades. I live on the east coast, and even petty stuff on the west coast is discoverable from my pocket. A perceived rise in crime might be in part due to being made aware of more of the crime that was always happening.
TLDR: disorder is also attributable to social media effects, reclassification of crime as not-crime or lesser-crime, and knock-on effects from lower penalties for real crime. Also, real crime may have shifted from obviously violent forms to less violent, but in greater volume; specifically, financial fraud. High quality fraud data, if available, should shed more light on whether this is the case. (Matt Runchey's comments appear to provide some leads.)
If the 1930s - 1960s were the recent lowest point in crime/disorder, but compared to the period 1960-1990/into the 2000s, our present period is doing much better, then this is going to get societally weighted by who the most prominent crime/disorder complainers are.
If 80% of complaints of higher crime and disorder are dominated by boomers, then they were either a child at the end of that golden age, or remember it going away, and have simply not done recent updates. The other side of it is that if you know about racial and geographical origin crime statistics in America and Europe, you would intuitively expect crime to have gone up (certainly gang related grenade attacks have risen in Sweden, but perhaps overall crime has gone down; I haven't checked recently), if you don't do some further discount for ageing society, better enforcement, bowling alone social dynamics reducing opportunities for crime etc etc. Then there's social media so that everyone knows what the most recent severe criminal incident is.
Math up:
https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/3-strikes-and-you-need-to-be-out
80% of crimes are committed by people with three or more arrests. Is this related to disorder? Yes, absolutely. We aren't doing a good job of putting the bad people away.
And most interactions with bad people aren't crimes. They're proto-crimes.
Even the axewielding maniac running around a Target didn't actually hurt anyone, after all. Disorder? Yes. Criminal? Yes. But not showing up in aggravated assault, as he didn't Hurt Anyone. Physically at least.
Re: shoplifting, some thoughts from the Spiders Georg of shoplifting anecdata that is New York City.
Shoplifting in NYC is widely reported by most of its residents as having become "much worse" over the last decade. These reports are subjective, but are backed by steadily increasing security costs and retail location abandonment. However, none of this necessarily means that there's any *more* shoplifting than their was before!
Rather:
- Shoplifting in NYC has become more organized and systematic, such that successful shoplifting attempts tend to grab higher-value items with higher commensurate impacts on the store's bottom line. (The hypothesis for this systematization being that light punishment for shoplifting in NYC has led to gangs increasingly treating shoplifting as a low-risk revenue center.)
- Large chain stores in NYC are in a Red Queen race against shoplifters. Large chain stores must keep increasing YoY security spending (through measures like entire aisles locked behind plastic shields) in order to keep the total amount of shoplifting constant. Presumably, if they stopped increasing YoY investments into security, shoplifting would spike.
- The security costs of doing business often drive the higher-crime locations revenue-negative; these large chain stores choose to close these locations. Often, nothing replaces these locations (as other big chains see that their rival moved out and deduce that the location would be revenue-negative for them as well), leading to "urban blight" of the streets these locations were on (i.e. less legitimate traffic to businesses on the street = fewer "eyes" on the street = shoplifters can operate more openly.)
- Meanwhile, small family-owned bodegas in NYC cannot afford the costs of increased security required to deal with increasingly-sophisticated shoplifters. Most of these close as well. These storefronts may reopen, but now hosting either service businesses (hair salons, medical clinics, dentist's offices, massage therapists, payday loans) or retail businesses with pre-depreciated stock (e.g. restaurants/cafes, pawn shops.) (In other words, the offerings available on the street begin to resemble those of a blighted commercial street.)
The disorder hypothesis always struck me as a desperation move by people who were embarrassed that actual crime statistics didn’t support their narrative. It simply became fashionable to believe that liberal cities with their PC policies allowed rot to settle into cities. Fox News played this theme on an endless loop in the early 2020s in an effort to discredit woke politicians and Biden
I really hate the tendency to try to construct "disorder" as some sort of natural category. A lot of people apparently have that impulse, but it strikes me as either inexcusably vague or deliberately dishonest (depending on the context). Just consider the kind of things being lumped together in this post:
1. Shoplifting. Shoplifting is theft, and theft is one of the most central examples of crime there is. Everyone understands why its bad.[1
2. Littering. On the one hand, littering does have a cumulative, negative impact on the hygenics and aesthetics of public space, and it's reasonable to want to control. On the other hand, it would get my nomination of the type of crime most likely to be perpetrated by "normies" (possibly alongside traffic crime).
3. Graffiti. In many cases, graffiti is an entirely victimless crime. A graffiti artist who jazzes up a publicly-owned wall that was previously bare concrete is doing, at worst, a really tiny amount of harm and at best a public service. Now people having their private property graffitied absolutely do have a valid complaint, but that would fall more under the "crime victimization" header than the "public disorder" header. People complaining about graffiti mostly seem to be complaining *that it exists*, regardless of who owns the surface its own. That right there is an aesthetic preference and nothing more.
4. Homelessness. And way down at the other end of the spectrum from shoplifting, we have the part where people's main complaint is poor people *existing in public.* Of course, basically everybody, regardless of their politics, would like the overall homelessness rate to go down. But as a "public disorder" complaint, it is a complaint not that housing is too expensive or the social safety net too weak. It's a complaint that some people really don't like having to look at The Poors under any circumstances.[1]
When you have a category that lumps together actual theft on one end, with The Wrong People Existing Where I Can See Them on the other end, it might be worth considering if it's just a bad category. By which I mean it obscures more than it reveals. A lot of the preferences that go into disliking "public disorder" are fundamentally aesthetic preferences. People are going to differ quite a lot on their aesthetic preferences, far more so than they differ on questions like "do you think it's OK for people to steal from you?" Trying to make laws enforcing people's aesthetic preferences on the public at large seems bound to cause no end of trouble, and do very little good.
[1] Of course, sometimes homeless people commit crimes like assault or theft. But that, again, is a crime victimization question, not a public disorder question.
One bit of data, one anecdote, one thing in the middle, and a hypothesis:
The frequency of graffiti on railroad cars is well-documented in railfan photos, and has been increasing substantially in the last 20-30 years. These days, it is rare to see a freight car without spray-paint graffiti. In the 1980s, it was the opposite. I'm not entirely sure when the switchover happened, but I would expect sometime between the mid-1990s and 2010ish.
A friend of mine grew up in Berkeley in the 1990s. They describe people using heroin on the street on Telegraph Ave. being a common thing then, and witnessed said users being verbally belligerent to a police officer who asked (not demanded!) that they move down to the public park to do their drugs. This was what was normal for that time and place.
Many of my family grew up in Myrtle Beach, SC. In the 1980s, there were numerous dance establishments that would commonly serve alcohol to underaged customers, and drug use and date rape (especially statutory rape) were normalized. I don't think I have a cousin from that era that didn't have a drug problem at one point or another, and they grew up in a definitely well-to-do family. Similarly, histories of Mountain View talk about an establishment that had regular wet-t-shirt contests with questionably-aged participants who would sometimes show up dead of drug overdoses afterwards. In the writeups I've seen of these that have quotes from people who were there firsthand, the people that were there often talk of them positively and fondly, even when they are directly talking about the "crime" and "disorder" parts.
I would note that everyone who is talking about personal perceptions of societal change over a timespan of decades is comparing a perception from when they were much younger than they are now, and in many cases are also comparing a world that they grew up in (and developed the survival instincts for) to one that has changed. My friend never felt uncomfortable on Telegraph Ave., or being technically homeless and couch-surfing with a series of lovers during a stretch of their college days. Whereas I would be totally skeeved out by that, and in my teenage years happily gave scritches to half-ton farm animals and habitually stepped on top of logs rather than over them in the forest without constant worry. People have complained about "kids these days" for millennia. It seems likely to me that, by normalizing the statistics and anecdotes to a consistent viewpoint (i.e, effectively something like "would a 35-year-old in 1990 have thought society was worse or better than a 35-year-old today?"), we are erasing a large part of the reason for the perceptions.
I'm surprised you didn't consider a very simple story for people experiencing a rise in "shoplifting disorder" despite a decline in shoplifting, which is that the risk of shoplifting causes shops to take countermeasures, which are effective, but which customers notice and dislike.
In my youth, I could go to a CVS, find the deodorant aisle, retrieve a stick of deodorant from the shelf, and pay for it at the register. Now the deodorant is hidden behind plexiglass, which I have to flag down an employee to open. This probably decreases shoplifting, but it is a clear degradation in my shopping experience.
Another example: I have never had a bike stolen from me. But this is because I know bike thieves are common, and take countermeasures to protect myself. Namely, I never lock my bike outside overnight, I strip it of accessories like strap-on lights when I leave it, etc... If I ever do leave it unlocked, for instance, leaning against the door of a small cafe in which I am fetching a cup of coffee, I watch it like a hawk, ready to charge out of the cafe should someone try to steal it. And, indeed, I have had to chase people down who tried just that. So in the statistics, I have 'never experienced theft,' but this is only because I modify my behavior to avoid experiencing theft, in a way which makes my bike significantly less useful to me.
I don't necessarily buy that crime is dramatically increasing, by the way. But I'm surprised you didn't consider the above explanation.
A few other considerations:
1. Urbanization. When two people punch each other in the middle of a farm, two people know about it. When two people fight in downtown there are dozens of witnesses. When it happens on a subway train there are dozens of witnesses who themselves are made to feel unsafe because they can't easily walk away. And they have to be in that environment every day.
2. Media coverage. Images and video are much more emotionally visceral. Getting images or video used to be rare and expensive, limited to only the most important events. Now just about every minor event has video coverage from multiple angles. Real-time coverage means that you can have a lot more "brain space" devoted to an issue. Consider how the eg. ICE protests/shootings in Minneapolis would have been covered in newspapers in the 1980s vs. today. In the 80s you would have a few column-inches and maybe a photo every day. Now you have video from multiple angles, the commentators who provide the video analysis, the commentators who provide the legal analysis. You can spend more time watching video about these events than the events actually took and I'm not sure that's psychologically healthy. But it gets eyeballs/clicks (and revenue). Even trivial things like the drug zombies leaning around in Philadelphia are available on-tap any time you want to be outraged.
3. Political advantage. Having a problem people care about makes it easier to get money, power, and votes. More funding for police, prisons, social services, and welfare. More gun rights. More gun control. Drug legalization. Drug prohibition. So politicians are incentivized to raise these issues into the public discourse even among people who otherwise wouldn't care. And also the failures of the policies of their opponents.
I'd guess its similar to the journalists theorem from the previous vibe session post. The people who are in the scrappy neighborhoods of major urban areas are more likely to be in the discussion, and their experience has been bad.
Also general urbanization fits into this. As someone who grew up in a more rural area, any amount of disorder seems shocking to me when I go into a major urban area. You can point to numbers for graffiti and boomboxes and homeless but for anyone who came from a more rural region those things just aren't visible at all, so every experience with a typical city is awash with disorder. There has definitely been an uptick in urbanization in the last 50 years, and each person gets their own moment of shock when travelling in the city for the first time.
Parents have used increased wages to pick locations where they can shelter their kids from all forms of disorder, where teenagers loitering is the most serious crime anyone will see. And those kids all grow up with an expectation of the world being orderly until later in life. It could be even after college with how many colleges are built as a bubble.
Here in Seattle, drug stores and grocery stores have adopted various anti-shoplifting measures: locking certain items, sequestering certain items in a "store within a store", installing turnstiles, and hiring security guards to "check receipts". Presumably they paid for these measures only because they had reason to believe that shoplifting was up. If shoplifting isn't up now, how much of that stability is due to these measures reducing shoplifting? If we went back to the way it was several years ago without these measures, how much would shoplifting increase? How much do these measures cost? As a customer, I find these measures to be a reminder that shoplifting is a problem today that it wasn't several years ago.
I remember being asked for receipts when exiting stores in the 90s, including at major chains like Costco and Home Depot. Got any data on what has changed?
I only know my own experience in Seattle where the change has been dramatic
Even a lower crime rate implies there being more crimes being committed over time. The idea of crime being a "rate" that can be accepted leads to the kind of low-trust society, where everyone needs to carry a keychain, or their car, bike gets stolen or home broken in. Long term exposure to such an environment is a hazard to mental health and social cohesion. Cortisol and such. The effect of that exposure is cumulative, even if crime rates may be lower than they once were.
Are boom box guys really still a thing? The idea sounds so like, 80s and 90s New York to me lol. Maybe they're just not a thing in my area and I'd never encountered them on my one trip to NYC or the times I've been to SF.
Boom box -> tiktok or whatever on phone
I wonder how much is the sense that the world is spinning out of control because conservatives in general and Trump in particular have not disappeared, as seemed inevitable in 1992 and 2008. I am suggesting some societal analogy to referred pain. I haven't the faintest idea how to measure that. The only vague evidence I have for it is that conservatives have always been upset by disorder and are oversensitive to it. Now it is liberals as well.
I fundamentally disagree with the entire framing of this post and most of the comments I’ve seen. The implicit assumption seems to be “people thinking crime is bad and getting worse is a worsening phenomenon”, but I don’t think it is! My lived experience is the opposite of what Scott and most of the comments describe.
Crime was a constant topic in 80s and 90s TV, and in political campaigns of the time. Republican politicians used to run on “tough on crime” as a primary platform. Now they run on immigration, with crime as a secondary justification rather than the primary campaign promise. This shift is exactly what I’d expect to see when crime rates become lower.
Gallop has been tracking this.
In 1994 52% of people saw crime as the top problem (42% when you average all the polls from that year) now it is only around 3%. What more do you want? 0% of people saying crime is their top issue?
So then why am I the only one commenting this? Simple: people’s baselines assumption for how people should respond to good times are off.
What if during times when things are getting better 80% of Americans will always view things as declining (but not as their top issue) and during times of major decline that number jumps to 90%+ (and lots of people saying it is their top issue). I think there is a sort of default negativity bias among Americans (all humans maybe idk). Maybe in an absolute utopia we get all the way down to 70% of people thinking things are going to shit and then we will known we’ve made it. If people didn’t feel this way the world wouldn’t have improved so drastically over the last couple hundred years.
This gallop pol almost exactly confirms my hypothesis (about crime at least):
https://news.gallup.com/poll/544442/americans-crime-problem-serious.aspx.
This is completely different than the Vibecession. Scott spent a huge chunk of that post justifying the assertion that vibes were indeed bad, but no time justifying that in this post. The Vibecession is very well documented and I personally noticed it even before the term existed. This feels very different than the vibecession to me.
(Note: I am Gen Z I just enjoy watching old TV shows, so maybe I’m wrong about the subjective changes)
Where I am, a mainly middle class/working class distant suburban area of New York, maybe closer to the exurbs, locking up merchandise seems mainly a practice of CVS and Walgreens. Supermarkets rarely lock things up except for the most obvious items such as powdered baby formula* and sometimes razor blades. Target is much the same, I rarely go to Walmart so I don’t know about them.
* = theft of baby formula is not the doing of poor mothers desperate to feed their infants, but of drug dealers who use it as an extender for narcotics.
I had no idea of the meaning of “secular” as used in this article. Even when I looked it up, I didn’t read the list far down enough to reach any of the meanings that not “non-religious”. Took me a second trip to the dictionary to finally see it.
Am I the only one?
Consider effects measures. How many home depots have had to lock up all cordless power tools behind cages before/after say 2023? (The one closest to me resorted to this sometime in the last few years.) Such locking up is costly (cages, plexiglass, locks) and likely reduces sales because of customer frustration.
By the way, blue on blue text is hard to read, is there some reason the web page background can't be white?
https://x.com/i/grok/share/2ee68cb23021400685f276b20fe011f1
Less of this, please. If you have something to say, say it here.
Does the shoplifting rate remaining constant mean anything when enforcement measures are 100x as Draconian? If in society A you can enter a store and leave unbothered at any point and in society B products are locked behind glass, you need to scan your receipt to leave the checkout areas which constantly record you with face recognition systems, pass a one way gate and a security guard, and despite all that the shoplifting rate is the same, which has a bigger crime problem?
I do not see that anyone has mentioned the rise of mass shootings. While not contributing materially to the murder rate, they have had a profound impact on the perception of personal safety anywhere that people gather: schools - which have been reorganized around prevention -churches, synagogues, concerts and any sort of public festival. I know people who think of the risk pretty much any time they attend an event. This was not a thing 20 years ago, and surely represents an important decline in quality of life.
The wisdom of crowds seems to suggest that we should avoid them. Did Yogi Barra say that?
If mass shootings are driving the perception of crime rise, then the most straightforward solution is to stop reporting and overreporting them. Mass shootings are a tiny fraction of all crime, massively overrepresented and even miscounted in reporting (for reasons both natural and motivated), and drive copycats.
<If mass shootings are driving the perception of crime rise, then the most straightforward solution is to stop reporting and overreporting them.
Agreed, but it ain't gonna happen. Mass shooting reports get eyeballs for the media. I wonder whether anyone has calculated how much each earns in increased revenue for the media? The dead are a truckload of solid gold statues for them. Charlie Kirk was a solid gold Statue of Liberty.
The risk is tiny. You're more likely to win the lottery than you are to get killed in a mass shooting. I understand people being spooked, though. But I personally never give it a thought in theaters and similar settings.
Of course, it's not a rational fear. But tell that to the school system, which has lockdown drills on a routine basis, and will shut down a school and send everyone home for the day if some kid posts a photo of a mushroom cloud on instagram.
this clicks. the data says crime is down but people's lived experience says otherwise – and "disorder" explains the gap better than reporting bias
the shoplifting analysis is particularly good. FBI stats flat, retail surveys flat, but everyone feels like it's exploding. maybe the shift isn't volume but visibility? a few high-profile viral videos of brazen theft do more for perception than 1000 unreported incidents
the 1930s-1960s "local minimum" theory is underrated. we're not comparing to history, we're comparing to our parents' sanitized postwar bubble. of course everything feels worse
one addition: homelessness might be flat nationally but hyper-concentrated in ~10 cities. SF/LA/Seattle absorb the visibility tax
My theory is that the frustration comes not from the absolute amount of disorder, but the ratio of its amount to its perceived preventability. In 1935, we didn't get too indignant about people dying from simple bacterial infections. But if the same infection killed someone in 1955, you bet that we'd be angry! Antibiotics were cheap by then. My point is that the same bad outcome seems far worse when we know that we have the capacity to prevent it. As a society we are undeniably richer than we were back in the 60s, and as New Yorkers and San Franciscans, well, you can't even compare. So it's reasonable to expect that with our new riches we'd find remedies for the awful things that ail us. If you say "actually Polio is no worse now than it was in the 50's, so why are you being such a whiny baby?" I'd say it's because we now have a Polio vaccine, so it has no business ever getting close to as bad as it was then. And maybe it's the same with crime. People are bothered by shoplifting, but they're extra bothered when they see cops leaning and shrugging as shoplifers fill their loot bags in the store that the cops were supposed to protect. The preceived preventability of crime is a big part of what bothers us, and I think it's preventability feels like it's increasing even if its magnitude is constant. That's bothersome.
Your problem is not proving whether US crime has dropped a bit in the last few years. Its why even with that drop, US has crime rates 2-3x higher than other developed countries. Answer that, statistics boy.
Well, it doesn’t really seem to hold up once it’s looked into. Homicide definitely; more like 3 to 5 times higher. The fact that the United States is a gun culture has something to do with that. In other sorts of violent crimes, such as assault and rape there is a lot of divergence in what is defined by those charges from country to country and makes comparison rather difficult. In short, very arguable. The UK actually seems to have higher assault statistics than the United States, which has something to do with football hooliganism and pub culture apparently. Rape and sexual assault have the highest statistics in Nordic countries, but that seems to be very much a definitional issue: what they call rape in Sweden and what they call rape in America.
Here's a meta-question on your topic. I'm convinced by the argument that crime and disorder are not getting worse despite what many people believe. Nor do I credit the widespread fear that civilization is on the brink of collapse. My meta question is: "Are the fears -- if not the facts -- getting worse?" Do we always whine, complain, and worry about the state of society, regardless? Or does the fear itself wax and wane, and can we measure that?
You complain quite a bit about boomboxes in public spaces. Care to explain a bit more why? In my view this comes off like a personal preference -- likely that public spaces should be orderly rather than chaotic; for individuals to go about their business peacefully rather than have their senses deluged with music etc. But I've never read an attempt to substantiate this view. It doesn't appear obviously correct to me.
I'll make an attempt here to articulate the opposite position, which I hold I've also never seen anyone articulate. Public spaces are public, which means they are for _everyone_, including people who enjoy playing loud music. It is not generally right for the government to impose a particular way of existing on people in a public space. Rather, norms are formed by the people who populate a space. This means that loud music is completely acceptable in some locations (e.g. Dolores Park on a weekend) but also less acceptable in other locations (Alta Plaza in SF, which is full of families). There is nothing wrong with playing loud music in public; it is all contextual; and if it's happening a lot in crowded spaces when you're around, but you find it detestable, you're likely in the minority, since other people at least seem willing to tolerate it. (This argument falls down on the subway, where you have no choice but to stay there).
You can also categorize music in public as disorderly, but in a pro-social way; like the way that a bar or party is disorderly, or even a public market. Not everything that is disorderly is anti-social! And just because you personally find something disorderly and personally objectionable doesn't mean it's a net negative.
Public spaces are for everyone, including people who like setting off flashbang grenades and stink bombs. Fortunately, a space being "for" someone, does not imply that it is for them to do absolutely anything they like there.
I'm not sure he thinks of it as more than a personal preference -- that's why he feels OK about saying he recommend the death penalty for it. If he really thought it was a crime that should be punished he'd be much more circumspect about is personal preferences. I don't much like boom boxes in a public space, because they are never playing the music I'd like as the sound track to my day, and they force me to listen to somebody else's sound track, but I don't loathe them the way Scott does. What I really loathe is TV's mounted on the wall in waiting rooms, spraying out TV turd. I dislike TV so much I don't even own one, nor any substitute. I just watch a movie now and then on my computer. I hate the sound of the trained voices of newcasters and such, the trained fake emotional spectrum of sombre, serious, funny-stuff, etc, and TV ads make me want to beat my head against the wall. And I hate the idea that an ever-yapping TV is sort of like running water, something everybody counts on and needs.
A thought I just had about why people might perceive crime being up, but not an increase in people being victims: by far the most common illegal behavior I personally encounter is people driving cars unsafely. It actively makes my life worse when I'm walking through a crosswalk and the walk signal is on but I have to take evasive maneuvers to avoid getting run over by someone majorly running a red light! And more so worse that I have to always be on guard for those people, whether or not they're around! But I'm not exactly the victim of a crime per se because someone drove unsafely/illegally in my vicinity.
I haven't yet looked to actual data to confirm or reject this, but the vibes I'm feeling is that this sort of behavior is up since covid and hasn't gone down, because people as a whole are acting more selfishly and with less consideration about the impact they have on the people around them. And this could be the case without invalidating any of your arguments that generally focus on either crimes with a victim (like murder or shoplifting) or on crimes that leave behind concrete evidence (like littering and graffiti).
I think we should be careful extrapolating percent or per capita data when assessing the 'vibes' impact of policies like homelessness and litter. If NYC goes from a population of 7M in the 1980's to 9M 45 years later, two things can be true:
1. Percent of people littering/homeless can go down
2. Absolute amount of littering/homelessness can go up
In the same time, the overall US population has risen significantly. Now, some of that population is likely to have moved onto new roads or into new neighborhoods, but not all. To the extent cities become more densely populated over time, we may see increased absolute amounts of certain types of disorder/crime even as rates of disorder/crime go down.
In the end, it's your proximity to disorder/crime that matters most. This is the explanation for 'white flight' into the suburbs. It doesn't matter to the Smiths that, actually, fewer of their neighbors got shot per capita last year. If they keep hearing gunshots, they're going to complain about the violence. The same with litter. Sure, the rate of litter might go down, but if the streets are more clogged with Burger King wrappers, who's keeping track of the official per capita littering rate?
You should also take into consideration the "constancy of the worry coefficient." No matter how high or low the actual levels of crime, any given individual or group will tend to worry about the same amount. It's how much mental concern and anguish are applied to the problem irrespective of actual crime.
The thing that made me realize all of these issues are almost certainly just vibes is that people complain about the price of Youtube Premium.
At your fingertips, you have an infinite amount of entertainment. Thousands of people dedicate their lives to making funny, engaging, beautiful, and informative things for you to watch. The greatest professors in the world give their lectures, the greatest musicians on earth perform, the funniest comedians have their own Youtube show, and news organizations equip and pay entire crews to attend newsworthy events, just so you can watch it.
All of this is FREE. If you want to get rid of the ads, you can pay 15$ a month to even watch ad free. And people complain about it. Imagine showing Youtube to Rene Descartes or Albert Einstein, and while they're in awe with the incredible beauty of modern music or the incredible depth of knowledge available to them, you tell them "it's way too expensive though, this costs me like 70% of 1 hour of wage every month".
I'm fairly convinced that peoples perception of things like crime or the economy are almost completely disconnected from the real world.
+1 this... no matter HOW GOOD things get, people will find ways to bitch about it. Lowest infant mortality, lowest global poverty rate, lowest $ANY_BAD_THING...? But there are SOME PEOPLE WHO ARE EVEN RICHER! I can kinda sorta see the complaint, but it mostly strikes me as sour grapes