‘Are We Counting the Same Thing?’

Why is violent crime down in the U.S.? Tracey Meares on what’s happening, what Americans think is happening, and how much anyone actually knows about it at all. Brought to you by [BetterHelp]( Recently from The Signal: Matthias Matthijs on [what the far right’s recent election successes mean for Europe](. … Today: Why is violent crime down in the U.S.? Tracey Meares on what’s happening, what Americans think is happening, and how much anyone actually knows about it at all. … Also: Michael Bluhm on the anti-monopoly case against Google in the U.S.—and the virtually inconceivable advantage the company has over its competitors. Subscribe to The Signal? Share with a friend. … Sent to you? Sign up [here](. Shadows and Fog Philippe Mignot In 2021, Chicago’s dispatchers were sending police to more than two murder sites a day—797 homicide cases in total. That was 299 more than in 2019. The Chicago Police Department couldn’t keep up—and the clearance rate, measuring how many of those crimes they solved, showed it. But last year, the number dropped to 617. During the pandemic, violent crime spiked in America. The murder rate, in particular, rose 29 percent between 2019 and 2020—the largest single-year increase in more than a century. But since then, it’s gone down—and in the first quarter of 2024, dramatically: Violent crime in the U.S. fell by 15 percent in the period of January through March compared with the same period in 2023, while murder, specifically, fell by more than 26 percent. Murder is up in a few cities, it's true—Los Angeles, for example, or Atlanta—but violent crime overall has plummeted across the country. And in Washington, D.C., where murder was up by 35 percent last year, it was back down by 25 percent this year. What’s going on? Tracey Meares is a professor of law at Yale University. As she explains, the rise and fall of violent crime in America can be traced to what went wrong during the pandemic. With people home isolating, authorities couldn’t run anti-violence programs. Now, those programs are working again. But as crime falls, people’s perceptions of crime don’t necessarily keep up with reality. That’s partly because crime is a highly political issue—and we live in a [highly polarized time](. But perhaps more fundamentally, it’s because official statistics leave out so much of what people care most about when it comes to crime and their safety … [Read on]( The Signal is a new current-affairs brand for understanding democratic life, the trend lines shaping it, and the challenges confronting it. Learn [more](. And [join](—to be a valued member, support our growth, and have full access. Advertisement From Tracey Meares at The Signal: - “People in America often look to the federal government or even the president to fix things. But in the United States, crime reduction happens fundamentally at the state level. The U.S. government has a lot of constraints on it—far more than the U.K. government—but at the same time, the U.S. as a whole might have more flexibility, because these subunits—the individual states and local authorities—could do more than the federal government does. Often, they end up doing less, but the potential is there.” - “The framework the FBI uses for data focuses on eight so-called index crimes: homicide, rape, aggravated assault, robbery, burglary, motor vehicle theft, larceny, and arson. But those crimes—assuming they’re all counted—might not be what people think of when they think about how crime affects their everyday lives. There’s a lot of focus on murder, for example—but murder is a very rare occurrence. Car crashes are much more common. Shoplifting, meanwhile, is not counted as an index crime; it’s counted separately. So, when the FBI is talking about crime rates, they’re usually not talking about shoplifting. But shoplifting is an offense that really affects people’s daily lives. Now, whenever I go to my drugstore, everything is behind lock and key. If you want to buy shampoo, you have to push a button, and then somebody has to come and unlock it. It wasn’t always like that.” - “In America, we often focus on the problem of violent crime as the problem to fix. But if we see it less as a single category and more as one aspect of what Weaver calls “safety deprivation,” we can see more of how perception and reality interact for people. Violence is just one of many things that deprive people of safety. To be attacked, or at risk of attack, is to experience a lack of safety, yes. But to experience [homelessness]( is to experience a lack of safety, too. During the pandemic, the kinds of safety deprivation people experienced proliferated; in Flint, Michigan, the water was so bad, you couldn’t even wash your hands with it. When people feel unsafe, they tend to interpret their world as unsafe.” [Read on]( The world is complex, ambiguous, and inherently uncertain … That’s why we look at it the way a detective would: Everything The Signal does starts with good questions, and every answer leads us to more of them. Become a [member]( to unlock this full conversation and explore the archive. Advertisement Distracted, drained, … disconnected? You deserve to feel focused, calm, and in control. Connect with a licensed therapist who specializes in helping you manage stress and achieve a better work-life harmony. [Learn more]( Sign up now and save 30%. NOTES It’s the Data, Stupid Robin Pierre It’s the data, stupid. In a Washington, D.C., courtroom on August 5, District Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google controlled a monopoly on internet search and had engaged in years of illegal acts to thwart competition. “Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” Judge Mehta wrote in his 277-page ruling—emphasizing that the company had exploited its position to charge advertisers well above market rates to place ads against search results. Meanwhile, Google has an 89 percent share of the overall search market and a 95 percent share of the mobile search market in the U.S.—and a 92 percent and 95 percent share globally. Mehta has given Google and the U.S. administration a deadline of early September to file their recommendations for remedies to the corporation’s search monopoly. He could choose to break Google up—forcing it to split up its search, advertising, and Android phone businesses, for instance—or, say, ban the kind of deals Google struck with Apple to make Google the default search engine on iPhones. So what’s a judge to do? Mehta gave little indication in his ruling. Some have compared the case to the government’s courtroom victory over Microsoft in 1999, when the U.S. successfully sued it for abusing the monopoly of its Windows operating system. But this case is, in at least one important way, unprecedented: Windows was only one operating system among many; Google’s search engine provides vastly better results and dominates the market because it has so much vastly more of the most valuable commodity there is in the digital realm: data—server farms and server farms of data; orders of magnitude more data than any of its competitors. All this data allows Google to guess better than anyone what people really want when they type in their search queries—and its value to Google illustrates [its value across the economy in this digital era](: The quantity and quality of data largely determine the capabilities—and profitability—of social media, news media, AI, and advertising today. Those with the best data on their audiences and products have a colossal advantage over their competitors. In this light, Julia Angwin, a former technology reporter at The Wall Street Journal and ProPublica—now the founder of the nonprofit publication The Markup, covering the effects of technology on contemporary society—[suggests a framework for thinking about the question Judge Mehta is facing](: If Google had to make its data available to competitors and potential competitors, Angwin says, it would be consistent with the way some telecommunications companies have to make their lines available to others—to enable effective competition among internet providers. And as long as Google doesn’t have to make that data available, she says, there’ll never be real competition in search—no matter what else a judge might impose. —Michael Bluhm [Explore Notes]( Want more? Join The Signal to unlock full conversations with hundreds of contributors, explore the archive, and support our independent current-affairs coverage. 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