What is important is crime rate given exposure. Not crime rate.
Mitigation matters.
This misreasoning or misrepresentation is at the heart of a lot of nonsense to do with interventions and effects. See COVID and what not.
It is very hard to measure crime rate given exposure.
And finally rates do not matter much. What matters is interventions and policy in reaction to each observation. People feel that each murder not resulting in back propagation through policy intervention space to update the weights to prevent it from happening. Instead only narrative space weights are being updated.
The idea that rare events below some threshold on a per capita per year basis must be ignored is pushed around too and people can see through it.
How much has spend on crime cameras gone up over the last few decades and how do you factory that into crime data? How have people moved? We don't have contact rates for people and criminals so it's all very hard to estimate.
Just because many basic people simply can not study rare events without getting upset doesn't mean we should not do so and try to drive the rate of bad things happening to zero.
It's particularly bad in the UK where rates are actually up yet the media seems to always pick some dimension where arrests or crimes are down and push that. People no longer trust the data process let alone the reasoning behind most media reports. They might not be able to describe it but they can feel it.
I get irritated about this as it's the same contact process and susceptibility problem in epidemiology and yet some how politicized the other way.
There's tons of sites that show this to varying degrees, here's a few[0,1,2]. Crime is actually fairly localized. This is either entirely surprising or unsurprising to people. That the difference can be just a few blocks. There's quite a bit of research on the topic, and crime is even the main topic of Steve Levitt, that guy from Freakanomics.
But I'm not sure this is really all that related to the topics. Considering that crime is localized and that victims follow a power distribution (a few people are victims to many crimes while a lot of people are victims to few/no crimes) then that only ends up highlighting the distortion even more.
> What matters is interventions and policy in reaction to each observation
This I agree with the most. Certainly we haven't been doing a great job at this and I think it is a more effective discussion to have. Though this too can get heated and myopic very fast. People love to assume that there are clear and simple solutions but do not take the time to recognize that if they were so simple they probably would be used. If they are simple it is even simple for the incompetent. But I think a lot of people are unwilling to admit that topics like crime are exceptionally complicated. I'm not sure why, it is a problem we've been unable to solve across thousands of years of human civilization. Clearly it isn't an easy problem to solve.
> What is important is crime rate given exposure. Not crime rate.
Exposure to what?
> What matters is interventions and policy in reaction to each observation
Responding to individual incidents usually produces terrible legislation. It's hard to get legislators and the public to back off and stop demanding harmful and expensive reprisals, to instead do something that actually works.
Mitigation matters.
This misreasoning or misrepresentation is at the heart of a lot of nonsense to do with interventions and effects. See COVID and what not.
It is very hard to measure crime rate given exposure.
And finally rates do not matter much. What matters is interventions and policy in reaction to each observation. People feel that each murder not resulting in back propagation through policy intervention space to update the weights to prevent it from happening. Instead only narrative space weights are being updated.
The idea that rare events below some threshold on a per capita per year basis must be ignored is pushed around too and people can see through it.
How much has spend on crime cameras gone up over the last few decades and how do you factory that into crime data? How have people moved? We don't have contact rates for people and criminals so it's all very hard to estimate.
Just because many basic people simply can not study rare events without getting upset doesn't mean we should not do so and try to drive the rate of bad things happening to zero.
It's particularly bad in the UK where rates are actually up yet the media seems to always pick some dimension where arrests or crimes are down and push that. People no longer trust the data process let alone the reasoning behind most media reports. They might not be able to describe it but they can feel it.
I get irritated about this as it's the same contact process and susceptibility problem in epidemiology and yet some how politicized the other way.