범죄에 대한 인식과 현실: 공포와 통계의 불일치

범죄율이 감소하고 있음에도 불구하고 도심 지역의 범죄에 대한 언론 보도와 오해로 인해 범죄에 대한 대중의 인식은 여전히 높습니다.

### 미국인의 범죄 인식과 현실의 차이
* 📈 "**2019년 이후 살인율이 급증**했지만, 아직 팬데믹 이전 수준에는 미치지 못하지만 **감소**하고 있습니다. 광범위한 폭력 범죄와 전국 재산 범죄율도 감소하고 있어 모든 지역에서 모든 범죄가 감소하고 있는 것은 아니지만 **대부분의 지역에서 감소**하고 있습니다.
* 📊 시간이 지남에 따라 범죄율이 감소하고 있음에도 불구하고 **미국인의 77%는 범죄가 증가하고 있다고** 일관되게 믿고 있습니다. 지난 35년간의 갤럽 데이터는 실제 범죄율이 감소하고 있음에도 불구하고 **범죄에 대한 두려움이 지속**되고 있음을 보여줍니다.
* 🏙 범죄에 대한 인식과 현실, 특히 범죄 발생 지역에 대한 인식 사이에 상당한 불일치가 있습니다. 예를 들어, 시카고에서는 **2020년 총기 사망자 증가의 대부분이 다운타운 지역이 아닌 불우한 지역에서 발생**했습니다.
* 📺 언론 보도는 종종 부유한 지역이나 관광지에서 발생하는 범죄에 초점을 맞추기 때문에 **범죄가 도심에 만연해 있다는 인식**을 심어줍니다. **소외된 지역에서 발생하는 지역 사회 또는 일상적인 총기 폭력**은 그다지 주목을 받지 못할 수 있습니다.
* 🏠 " 보호받지 못하는 노숙자의 증가와 눈에 띄는 약물 사용 등 도심 지역의 인구 구성에 변화가 생기면서 안전감이 떨어지고 있습니다. 그러나 **데이터에 따르면 취약한 인구와 범죄를 동일시하는 것은 잘못된 생각**입니다.
* 🏛 많은 정치인과 정책 입안자들이 **증거가 아닌 인식을 바탕으로 정책**을 만들고 있습니다. 이로 인해 사소한 범죄에 대한 더 가혹한 처벌과 범죄의 실제 원인을 효과적으로 해결하지 못하는 정책과 같은 **비생산적인 해결책**이 도출되고 있습니다.

[click] [click] [click click click]. In the fall of 2022, we conducted 100 interviews in New York, Seattle, Chicago, Philadelphia. Hanna Love: she researches cities and public safety at the Brookings Institution. What we overwhelmingly heard from folks was fear of crime in downtown business districts. It was two years into the pandemic, and in the middle of what felt like an explosion of American crime. “Crime spiking on the streets of cities across the country grapple with crime— crime has increased— nationwide spike in violent crime— violent crime in the US is rising— homicides increased by 36%.” But since then, the story has gotten a little more confusing. Sometimes, the news says that crime is going down. But other times... “Crime is turning cities into war zones.” “FBI is underreporting.” “Random acts of violence.” Two thirds of Americans say crime in the US is a very or extremely serious problem.

And more than three quarters of us say there's more crime than a year ago. So which is it? Crime up or crime down? And if it is down, what exactly do most Americans actually think is happening with crime? Crime. Crime. Crime, crime, Crime! Crime. Crime! Crime! Crime! Crime! Crime! Crime! Crime! Crime! Crime! Crime! Crime! Crime! Crime! Crime! So, my first question was, when the news says that crime has decreased, where’s that info coming from? I asked my colleague Abdallah. My name is Abdallah Fayyad, I'm a policy correspondent at Vox. The two areas that we get our crime statistics from are: The FBI crime database... Law enforcement agencies around the country voluntarily report their crime data. The other is the National Crime Victimization Survey, which is administered by the federal government, and asks people directly whether or not they have been victims of a crime.

And both of these sources have their own limitations. The survey usually talks to around a quarter of a million people, which is both a lot of people,
and only about 0.07% of the country. And the FBI’s data is by nature only made
up of crimes that get reported to police. That's actually a big reason the FBI’s data on homicide is one of the most widely studied and cited crime statistics — because murder is almost always reported. Now, right now, this chart ends in 2019. Add 2020, and we see murder spike. There is a reason why people
feel like crime is going up — because crime was going up. But experts we talked to also recommended putting that spike into context: of the way
that things were before this. What sociologists and criminologists refer to as the great crime decline of the nineties. And if you extend the chart in the
other direction too, all the way to 2023,

that 2020 spike starts to look temporary. It's now falling. Not yet to where it was before the pandemic, but down. So that's homicide. But we can also look at the FBI's broader violent crime rate over that same period of time, which also looks like it's falling. The national property crime rate is a similar story. This doesn't mean that all crime is going down everywhere. But it does mean it's down in most places. And yet, 77% of us say the opposite is true. So let's look closer at that. The polling organization Gallup has actually been asking Americans this question for about 35 years. And their data on how people have answered it over that time gives us a clue on how to interpret it. Because it turns out, with the exception of like two years, a majority of Americans have always said that crime is higher than it was last year. What we're seeing is a consistent fear about crime, despite the fact that over the same period of time,

crime had been steadily on the decline, and it's also worth taking a similar look at this chart from earlier, where two-thirds of Americans say crime is a very or extremely serious problem in the US. We can also chart that over time and see that it is also a pretty consistent belief. But Gallup also asked another version of that question: How serious a problem is crime in your area? And only a small minority of Americans typically say that crime where they live is a very or extremely serious problem. In other words, the vast majority of Americans feel safe. But there is this kind of abstract perception of crime is out of control. Crime is out of control. But not where I am. But somewhere. That “somewhere” was partly the subject of Hannah's research interviews, many of which, remember, were about a specific fear in a specific place. Fear of random acts of violence downtown. Violent crime downtown. In the parts of cities where people go to work.

Hannah and her team found that interesting, because they also did a geographic analysis
of where in cities crime was happening. When we crunched the data,
we found that there was a significant mismatch in perception and reality of crime, particularly as it pertains to where crime occurs. In Chicago, for example, they found that most of the increase in gun deaths in 2020 happened in disadvantaged neighborhoods on the West, South, and Southwest sides, and barely at all in the dense downtown Loop area. In New York, they found that in the busiest parts of the city, violent crime only increased about 2% from 2019 to 2022, compared to an 8% increase in the rest of the city. Downtowns were not driving any sort of citywide increases in crime, even though people felt as though they were. So even when violent crime was higher, it wasn't high where people thought it was high. But why did people think that?

Hold on to that thought. Because, slight tone change... This video is sponsored by BetterHelp. The US election is just a few months away, which for a lot of people is stressful. It is important to stay informed, but it is also important to take care of yourself. And this month, while the stress of the fall
is still kind of in the distance, is a good time to start. The way that BetterHelp works is that you fill out a brief questionnaire, and you get matched with a licensed therapist, although you can switch therapists at any time for no additional charge. Take a moment, visit betterhelp.com/VoxVideo
to get 10% off your first month. Alright. So we were looking at this data,
that showed us that  while people thought urban downtowns
were really dangerous, they actually weren't. Now, one reason people thought that
might have been media coverage. Crime continues to concentrate within neighborhoods where it's always been bad. But community or everyday gun violence
often doesn't make the headlines.

as much as something that would happen in a wealthier or more tourist-based district. “Two violent attacks in Times Square.” “Two separate stabbings in Center City.” “Four robberies that have happened downtown.” But Hannah found that the people she talked to weren't just seeing stuff on TV. They were also reacting to something they were seeing in person. When we were doing our interviews, people often conflated crime and unsheltered homelessness within the same breath. One thing that has changed a bit since the pandemic is in who you see on the streets in these downtown neighborhoods. Before the pandemic, that would be overwhelmingly office workers. Some tourists. But there were also always some number of people on the streets experiencing homelessness, addiction, mental health issues. And then the pandemic emptied these places out. And, as office workers and tourists slowly returned... When there's less people crowding the streets, you're more likely to see things like visible homelessness or visible drug use.

Today, more of us are back in offices, but there are also, by some accounts, simply more vulnerable people on the streets, partly due to the cutting of social services. For example, by 2022, New York State had 20% fewer psychiatric beds for people with severe mental illness than it had in 2014. And from 2019 to 2023, the number of Americans experiencing unsheltered homelessness went up by more than 20%. I live in Boston, where over the past few years there has been a homeless encampment that does create this public perception that there is not just disorder, but chaos in how the city is running itself, even if those encampments don't necessarily pose, you know, an imminent threat or danger to the residents that live in those areas. Changes like these can make a city feel different, even less safe. But all the data we have tells us that equating vulnerable people with crime

is not correct. And here's the problem with that. “If people don't feel safe, then we're not accomplishing our task. Stats don't matter if people don't believe
they are in a safe environment.” What we're currently seeing right now is a lot of politicians and policymakers crafting policy based on perception rather than evidence. The governor of New York sent the National Guard to patrol the New York City subway. Crime on the subway had already been on the decline. That's an explicit example right there of having perception-based policy take a lot of municipal resources and taxpayer money, without having any results, because it's in the wrong place. A lot of what we're seeing are counterproductive policy solutions to crime in the long term. Harsher penalties for petty crime, that include eliminating eligibility for parole and probation. In San Francisco, voters imposed drug test requirements on welfare recipients. Tough-on-crime bills that we kind of felt like the country was moving away from
over the last 10, 15 years.

and now are coming back in a very big way. In a way, this is an impossible story to tell. Try telling the victim of an actual crime that crime is down. Try telling it to a country seeing real crimes on TV. Last time, I’ll show you this chart. And I want you to tell me which of the following two clips fits it better. “Last year, the murder rate saw the sharpest decrease in history. Violent crime fell to one of its lowest levels in more than 50 years.” “The defund-the-police Democrats have turned our once-great cities into cesspools of bloodshed and crime.” In April 2024, an ABC News poll found that voters trust Donald Trump over Joe Biden on crime and safety by a margin of eight percentage points. I was honestly surprised it wasn't more than that. Imagine that the homicide rate kept falling like this. And that by 2025 or 2026, you saw it get to its lowest in decades.

Most Americans are wrong about crime

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Vox video is Bridgett Henwood, Cath Spangler, Adam Freelander, Joey Sendaydiego, Coleman Lowndes, Christophe Haubursin, Kim Mas, Laura Bult, Ed Vega, Rajaa Elidrissi, and with research support from Melissa Hirsch. 

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범죄율의 상승과 하락에 대한 혼란스러운 이야기

미국 전역의 도심 비즈니스 지구에서 폭력 범죄가 급증하고 살인 사건이 36% 증가하는 등 범죄 증가에 대한 우려가 널리 퍼져 있습니다.

그러나 일부 언론에서는 범죄가 감소하고 있다는 상반된 보도가 나오고 있습니다.

범죄 통계는 FBI 범죄 데이터베이스와 전국 범죄 피해자 조사에서 얻는데, 두 가지 모두 데이터 수집에 한계가 있습니다.

최근의 범죄 급증은 전반적인 추세를 더 잘 이해하기 위해 90년대 범죄가 크게 감소했던 맥락에서 살펴볼 필요가 있습니다.

인식된 범죄율과 실제 범죄율의 불일치

전체 폭력 범죄율과 전국 재산 범죄율은 지속적으로 감소하고 있지만, 미국인의 77%는 그 반대의 생각을 하고 있습니다.

미국인들은 지속적으로 범죄가 증가하는 문제로 인식하고 있지만, 데이터에 따르면 대다수의 미국인들은 실제로 자신이 거주하는 지역이 안전하다고 느끼는 것으로 나타났습니다.

연구에 따르면 범죄에 대한 사람들의 인식과 실제 범죄 발생 장소 사이에 상당한 불일치가 있으며, 데이터는 그렇지 않음에도 불구하고 도심 지역은 범죄 발생률이 높은 지역으로 두려워하는 것으로 나타났습니다.

미디어 보도가 도시 범죄에 대한 인식에 미치는 영향

미디어 보도는 종종 도심을 실제보다 더 위험한 곳으로 왜곡된 시각을 만들어냅니다.

특정 지역에 집중된 범죄는 일상적인 폭력보다 덜 주목받기 때문에 오해를 불러일으키기도 합니다.

팬데믹 이후 직장인과 관광객이 도심 지역으로 돌아오면서 노숙자와 약물 사용에 대한 가시성이 높아져 도시 안전에 대한 대중의 인식이 형성되고 있습니다.

인식 기반 정책이 노숙자 및 범죄에 미치는 영향

사회 복지 서비스의 삭감으로 정신과 병상이 감소하고 보호받지 못하는 노숙자가 증가했습니다.

도시 내 노숙자 야영지는 임박한 위험이 없음에도 불구하고 안전에 대한 대중의 인식에 영향을 미치고 있습니다.

정치인들은 증거가 아닌 인식을 바탕으로 정책을 만들고 있으며, 이는 자원의 잘못된 배분과 범죄에 대한 비생산적인 해결책으로 이어지고 있습니다.

범죄가 만연한 사회에 대한 광범위한 믿음에도 불구하고 범죄율은 실제로 감소하고 있습니다.

정치인과 미디어는 종종 공포를 조장하기 위해 범죄가 증가하고 있다는 왜곡된 서사를 묘사합니다.

범죄에 대한 대중의 인식은 범죄율이 감소하고 있는 현실과 일치하지 않습니다.