If people aren’t panicked, they wouldn’t elect panic-pandering politicians, so there must always be a panic — crime, drugs, commies, libruls, etc.
That’s honestly pretty interesting.
I’d have just assumed it was going up too, if I hadn’t seen this. I chalk it up to social media, which is programmed to make a person think their opinions are all correct while also keeping them perpetually outraged. It keeps people’s dumb eyes glued to ads.
Still, thanks for the share.
Even after the drastic collapse in violent crime after the mid 90s people still swore that crime was worse than ever. So this isn’t something created by social media. Normal media figured out that outrage holds veiwership, and thus ratings, long before social media got into the mix.
That’s true. The media has always sensationalized things for ratings.
Personally I don’t watch news shows, so for me, social media was the first thing that came to mind when considering this trend. Even though 90% of my algorithm is parrot and cat videos, that other 10% is angry Karens.
Yeah, most of my suggested feed is horror, history, and music related stuff. However, even though I actively make sure I tell youtube not to suggest them, and make sure they are not in my history, I still get a regular flow of, mostly right wing, moral, and crime, panic stuff. Even though I have had told YT not to suggest Prager U shit, I have been getting war on christmas BS from them for a month now.
My neighbors swear they hear gunshots in our neighborhood every night. I grew up around guns in WV and I’ve shot plenty of guns. I don’t know what they’re actually hearing but it’s not gunshots and I can’t convince them any different. People believe what they want to believe and if the news they watch is all crime news then crime must be up.
Probably just fireworks, my neighbors constantly shoot them off for any reason on any day that ends with “y”, people who don’t know what gunshots sound like often confuse the two.
Fireworks, cars backfiring, and construction noises. I lived in a nice part of Oakland for years and Nextdoor was full of people terrified of these spectres
My Nextdoor is filled with people fearfully asking why there are helicopters overhead … when we live near numerous hospitals with helipads.
There’s a lot of roofing going on where I live, and some of my neighbors think the nail guns they use are gun guns.
the 24 hour news cycle plays a huge part in this, especially with local news.
They’ve expanded news from 30 minutes of national, and 30 minutes of local news a day, to 24 hour national coverage, and like 6+ hours of local coverage a day.
and theres just not that much shit going on to warrant that much coverage, especially in the local. So they start reporting stories from other places, so they always have some bullshit fear provoking shit to repeat ad nasuem for hours on end just to have something to fill the airwaves with.
So people are utterly convinced that crime is skyrocketing, despite all proof to the contrary.
This is a phenomena I’ve seen in my own family. THe more they watch the news, the worse they think crime is getting, and they just refuse any evidence to the contrary because “why would the news lie?!”.
And they can’t stand it when I say “For Ratings, obviously”
Really interesting how networks will never mention how wage theft is greater than all retail theft combined
or give a critical eye to stock buybacks or other financial malfeasance that exists only to enrich the ruling class at the expense of the peasantry.
I think people forget that the phrase “If it bleeds it leads.” for local news.
The news’ job is to tell us about the weird not so likely thing. But if that is all you ever see and hear then it must be happening more often.
I have to also wonder if it is due to people not understanding how things work.
When I moved from my rural area to a large local city, my small town father was quite concerned everything he saw on the evening news was happening in my neighborhood nightly too.
Every fire, gang shooting, stabbing, car theft, etc on the news that night was next door to me. He was pretty concerned in the beginning. He grew up in a pretty remote place which was small.
He passed over 10 years ago now and this was before social media really started to become our main sources of our curated news, not that he had a cellphone or a computer so I think for people like him social media would be even more effective at ramping up that fear of everything beyond the nonsense of the supermarket tabloids that had general threats and BS.
Now today’s social media and news entertainment can really zoom in on creating specific fears for each person or highlight BS that isn’t even a part of their normal lives to worry about.
My father had fairly outdated ideas like everything he saw in the press must be true because they wouldn’t be allowed to print it otherwise. That included the tabloids. I can only imagine those that digest social media click bait fall into this trap pretty far…
We outsourced the vetting of our news to “trusted” sources with journalistjc integrity. We adopted this idea that we’d let select news organization do the research and explain situations to us–with context and nuance. Their ethics and impartiality was a foundational tenant and we could trust that what they were telling us was generally well researched, fact checked, and had multiple sources and was generally nuanced.
But that shifted in the late 90’s and early 00s with the rise of 24hr “news” networks and the Internet…and an economic model where views and clicks generate revenue. Those old sources of information faced extinction and were forced to adopt more and more FUD approaches and catchy or outrage inducing headlines and articles to compete and get the views and clicks they needed.
I think we as a population and realistically our parents/grandparents have been slow to realize we can’t outsource our information feed. We have to take ownership of that and realize we can’t trust quite a bit of what we read online and even from formerly “trustworthy” news organizations.
I think the younger generations are already more skeptical and I hope that persists. We need more critical thinking and skepticism --but not so much that it turns into apathy and cynicism.
Is wage theft rising? People might know they are being wronged, but attribute it to the wrong group.
Yes
For republicans, ‘fear’ is their identity, and republicans love playing identity politics with it. They make up threats where there is none. My father for example doesn’t want lax immigration in case “someone comes over here with a bomb”. oh ok pops.
I have a co-worker who doesn’t want immigrants because she thinks they’re all unvaccinated and thus spreaders of disease. She is also anti-vax.
Ask him about Oklahoma City.
Right? It’s been a slow process but he’s a smart guy and he’s starting to show signs of critical thought. He just seemed to lean in real hard on “well, these GOP folks do sound reasonable.” And he’s right, if you don’t really pay attention to the word and content (or just accept it, uncritically) but listen to the cadence and indignation, they do sound reasonable. By comparison, leftists sound angry and a smart-sounding republican talking down to an angry leftist sounds reasonable. And, after all, most of the news sounds like the republican.
The number may be lower for Democrats, but it’s still a majority.
… and every category of major crime except auto theft declined.
Fucking tiktok…
TikTok certainly didn’t help, but those cars were basically designed to be stolen. No immobilizer, poorly designed key cylinder that pops out easily, and the tab in the ignition cylinder is perfectly shaped for a USB cable to slide over and turn it.
Context?
We got enough for a search, “tiktok car usb” will pull relevant news articles.
Democrats are seen as ineffective on crime while republicans are seen as more effective on crime. Regardless of the truth.
Have you considered that I have seen a video of some people doing a crime.
Well, there ya go. Case closed.
Where i am at people have lost all hope or any kind of belief in the police force
People aren’t reporting everything as they have collectively decided our police force is useless past a police report for insurance
And they more or less are
I think that’s a sentiment that’s bred from the outrage based news cycle. Our local police just caught a pedo in our neighborhood in 2 days (and we found out they were watching that person about 6 hours after the initial call to the police).
Police still do great work and a ton to protect and serve. That stuff doesn’t make national news cycles and it doesn’t sell articles.
acab.
That’s been the truth of things for generations.
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The party of “facts don’t care about your feelings”, right?
I don’t think they are counting political and corporate grift
They said crime is plummeting, that stuff’s just business.
58% is still higher than it should be, but once again the “facts over feelings” crowd proves that reality has a left bias.
I’ve been saying this for years and nobody on any side cares, they just want to be angry about something. Crime fell steadily from '93-'16 (except MA, crime started falling a little later than '93 there), and only had a slight uptick from 2016-now, still not at pre-'93 levels though. Looks like as per the article that pop is ending. I think the biggest problem there is the 24hr news cycle even existing, and the fact that they try to keep you enraged and watching by pushing only shit that’ll make you angry enough to come back and watch more.
Well I for one am fucking done with it, give me a 24hr happy/uplifting news channel and I’ll consider watching.
Beliefs are, essentially, opinions that people hold to very tightly without any evidence to support them.
Folks believe in gods, aliens, ghosts, trickle-down economics, eugenics, and all sorts of interesting things. They believe that crime rates are rising in exactly the same way.
While it is possible for someone to have a change in their beliefs, that change does not come easy. Certainly it does not come by presenting them with data that contradicts. Our best chance to change mistaken beliefs is in a dramatic and shocking event. The nature of a suitably dramatic and shocking event to shift a belief in the rise of crime eludes me completely.
Which gives us only plan B in two parts:
- present younger folks with the actual information and help them avoid falling into the collective delusion
- wait for older folks to die.
It occurs to me that we could speed this up by killing all the older folks, but that would obviously have an impact on crime statistics.
There is an old German (?) quote:
“Progress one funeral at a time.” that fits with what you are saying.
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And how do you go about deciding which information is true and which is to keep you in line?
