Jeff Asher:
I think there’s lots of little things that add up. The first is that there’s a data vacuum.
We don’t have a lot of good, strong data, and that’s the vacuum that we’re hoping that projects like the Real-Time Crime Index can fill. The FBI doesn’t put out its year-end numbers until nine months after the most recent year ended. So, one, you’re asking people to essentially not use data and use anecdotes, and they’re always going to have a bias towards how many murders have I seen on the news recently, rather than how many murders did I see last year at this time.
I think other challenges of the media doesn’t cover the planes that land, there’s rarely stories and I have done far fewer of these interviews where you’re talking about declines in murder, even though it’s a record decline, than were being done in 2020 and 2021, when we were seeing big increases in murder, big increases in gun violence.
And then you talked about at the beginning partisanship is playing a role; 90 percent of Republicans, 28 percent of Democrats and 60-something percent of independents think that crime rose over the last year. And we’re not seeing necessarily enormous just crime disappearing from American society.
So you would expect to see maybe 40, maybe 50 percent of the public thinking crime rose. That you have this enormous gap between how Democrats and Republicans see perceptions suggest that they’re being fed very different stories about what’s actually happening in terms of crime in the country.
