Crime As Proxy For Disorder

The problem: people hate crime and think it’s going up. But actually, crime barely affects most people and is historically low. So what’s going on?

In our discussion yesterday, many commenters proposed that the discussion about “crime” was really about disorder.

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, they risk getting called a racist or a “Karen”. But when they complain about crime, there’s still a 50-50 chance that listeners will let them finish the sentence without accusing them of racism. Might everyone be doing this? And might this explain why people act like crime is rampant and increasing, even when it’s rare and going down?

This seems plausible. But it depends on a claim that disorder is increasing, which is surprisingly hard to prove. Going through the symptoms in order:

Litter: Roadside litter (eg on highways) decreased 80% since records began in 1969 (1, 2), but it’s unclear if this extends to urban environments. New York City has a litter inspection and rating system that’s been in place since 1973, and they also report improvement - “from roughly 70 percent acceptably clean in the 1970s to over 90 percent clean now” - although citizens protest that the system doesn’t match their experience. National surveys find that the percent of people who admit to littering has gone down from 50% in 1969 to 15% today. None of these are knockdown evidence on their own, but taken together and added to the overall crime trends, the evidence for a secular trend downwards is convincing. The more recent numbers are all confounded by the pandemic, and I have no confidence in the direction of the trend since 2010.

Graffiti: There are no good data for graffiti. Most of the discussion focuses on New York, where everyone agrees the long-term trend is down since 1970. The Graffiti In New York City Wikipedia page has a “decline of New York graffiti subculture” section, which explains that in the 1980s, when “broken window” policing became popular, the police cracked down on graffiti and this worked somewhat. The only numbers are here, and ...