People's Perception Of Crime Rates Vs. Actual Crime Rates, Visualized
One of the great American policy success stories of the last quarter-century is the reduction in crime. There are many theories as to why this happened, ranging from the legalization of abortion (leading to fewer unwanted children prone to committing crimes as adults) to policies reducing childhood exposure to lead (which is linked to impulsive, aggressive behavior) to adding more police officers to the streets. (Vox did a big package analyzing all the major theories for the crime drop a few years ago if you're interested in learning more.) But curiously, the reduction in crime in America hasn't seeped into the public consciousness — or, at least, we stopped noticing it in 2001. That's the takeaway of a new visualization from Visual Capitalist showing the rate of various crimes since 1991 and the percentage of people who think the crime rate has increased in the past year.
It's worth noting that these graphs, while persuasive, are slightly misleading, since the y-axes don't start at 0 and use different scales. In other words, all of the crimes named above have decreased significantly in prevalence since 1991… but they haven't all decreased the same amount, as the visualization seems to imply.
