I learn something new every day

At work, I inevitably learn something new every day. That's the nature of any research-based job. When you're googling for an answer, you're gonna find something interesting. Usually, it's something mundane, and not incredibly useful.

Today what I learned about is the discrepancy between fear of crime and actual likelihood of experiencing crime. Sure, I already knew that Americans are hysterical and for no good reason. And sure, I know crime happens and a little prudence never hurt anyone. But the statistics I found were pretty eye-opening.

First of all, check out this article. If you scroll down, (just past the Starbucks coupon...oy), you'll see this quote:

Is the public's fear of crime grounded in fact?

Definitely, say police. The U.S. rate of violent crime (murder, assault, rape) in 1992 was 758 crimes per 100,000 people--almost one-third higher than it was in 1982.

The article goes on to state that possible solutions include more police and enforcing curfews. Now admittedly, findarticles.com may not be the place to find the most reliable articles. But this illustrates a very important point about how the media are willing to completely make up information and present it as fact. Here's how:

Now visit the official government page for the Bureau of Justice Statistics. What you'll find is that every type of crime has drastically decreased in the past 20 years, and reporting of crimes has increased. Look back at the first article. The first "fact" is that violent crime in 1992 was 1/3 higher than in 1982. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, this is patently untrue. In 1982, we saw 50.7 occurences of violent crime per 1000 people as compared to 47.9 per 1000 in 1992. Up by a third? Hmmm. In fact, it turns out that in some ways, crime in 1992 was higher and in some ways it was lower. But in the 14 years since then, we've seen drastically lower crime in just about all categories. Have you heard about this in the news? Because I haven't. It's one shooting after another. I know, I know, that's the job of the news and they're just doing what it takes to earn ratings. But I always like to find statistics that back up what I'm thinking of.

So I went snooping and found a nice study. I didn't read the whole study, because I stopped snooping once I found a fact I could use in what I was writing. But I really like this particular fact:

Crime coverage has increased while real crime rates have fallen. While homicide coverage was increasing on the network news by 473% from 1990 to 1998 homicide arrests dropped 32.9% from 1990 to 1998.

I know we've all heard this stuff before...or most of us have. I just had to reinforce it in my personal public avenue.