People always claim statistics are inaccurate when the statistics contradict their subjective experience or sincerely held belief.
One proxy for crime statistics is homicide. Any other stat can be juked, but homicide cannot because bodies stink. To someone who was insisting to me that the UK crime rate has increased over time, I pointed out that it was possible, but unlikely. Homicide is at a multi decade low in absolute numbers, and much lower in per capita numbers. That’s likely to be correlated with violent crime.
So in the case of the UK both homicide and violent crime have followed a gentle downwards trend line, and we can trust the first line completely. Therefore, the second is likely to be true.
Did it convince the guy I explained this to? No it did not. “You don’t live in a rough area like I do”. Ok then.
Crime is often hyper localized. In some areas of some cities, crime may be going up while the overall rate of the city or country is going down. These intensive areas can also change over time. I am not aware of any analysis of the localization of crime and how it changes over time. There are a lot of choices to be made in doing that analysis, but if a reasonable local analysis across a country did that and found that in all localities crime went down, then that would seem reasonable to dismiss that guy's actual experience. The localization should probably on the neighborhood level, maybe on the order of 1000 people instead of 10000 or more.
Which is why I didn’t deny his subjective experience. I only disagreed with him extrapolating his local experience to the whole country. His area might have become rougher, but the UK as a whole is seeing less crime.
One proxy for crime statistics is homicide. Any other stat can be juked, but homicide cannot because bodies stink. To someone who was insisting to me that the UK crime rate has increased over time, I pointed out that it was possible, but unlikely. Homicide is at a multi decade low in absolute numbers, and much lower in per capita numbers. That’s likely to be correlated with violent crime.
So in the case of the UK both homicide and violent crime have followed a gentle downwards trend line, and we can trust the first line completely. Therefore, the second is likely to be true.
Did it convince the guy I explained this to? No it did not. “You don’t live in a rough area like I do”. Ok then.