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This is no surprise.

We had a major surge in violent crime associated with COVID. Which makes sense - COVID was very stressful for all of this, and stressed out people act out in a variety of ways. Now that the stress is better, crime is dropping back to where it was headed before.

> This is no surprise.

Well, maybe it's a bit of a surprise, given how many people in this thread claim that it's not actually true.

OK, no surprise to me.

It is also no surprise to me that many people's understanding of reality is distorted to fit some random narrative that they want to believe.

True that.
a lot of the low end of the economy got hit hard, too. factory workers, warehouses, retail, fast food, etc. and that made it hard on those workers, as well as those on the lower end of the economy to get services from there.

no jobs, and no options -- so crime. now that things are bouncing back the problem is abating.

Are the reporting methodologies constant for the years compared?
The article states that they could not include New York City because they could not make the data comparable, so it is likely that that is concern of the people behind the study.
> Why it matters: The drop in violent crime puts a serious dent in one of the most frequently used lines of attack by former President Trump and his allies, who have sought to tie Democrats to the issue since 2020.

Maybe I'm missing the context of this publication/author as something focused specifically on electoral politics, but I find it strange that a dramatic drop in "homicide, rape, robbery and aggravated assault" in many cities "matters" according to this author, only because of its implications for the upcoming presidential election.

>> Why it matters: The drop in violent crime puts a serious dent in one of the most frequently used lines of attack by former President Trump and his allies, who have sought to tie Democrats to the issue since 2020.

> Maybe I'm missing the context of this publication/author as something focused specifically on electoral politics, but I find it strange that a dramatic drop in "homicide, rape, robbery and aggravated assault" in many cities "matters" according to this author, only because of its implications for the upcoming presidential election.

Honestly, the only people reading this stuff are political junkies who mostly care about their side winning in November. It also appears to be a national number, and those are totally irrelevant to people's everyday lives.

Also, this number is about violent crime, and I recall lots of people defending San Francisco's crime situation by pointing its murder rate, when people were actually complaining about things like car break-ins, brazen shoplifting, open-air drug use, etc.

So this number is mostly useful for bullshit and spin (e.g. "President Biden immediately seized on the new preliminary violent crime numbers showing a decline to tout the Our American Rescue Plan's assistance to police and gun violence legislation.").

Is there a link to the actual data?
Here's the actual article for anyone else getting hit by axios' badly configured (or default) cloudflare MITM: https://web.archive.org/web/20240812111827/https://www.axios...
>axios' badly configured (or default) cloudflare MITM

Weird, it works fine for me even on tor browser. Are you using an user agent spoofer?

Nope. But I'm using a small firefox fork which does not support bleeding edge javascript/css/etc which cloudflare typically uses to determine if the user-agent will provide enough spying ability to be worth letting in.
Garbage data analysis, reporting the statistical rebound from a statistically anomalous period (covid) as if it's some kind of trend. To the article's credit, they make no effort to hide their political motives behind misinforming their audience.
The very first sentence of the article says

> sharp drop […] as the COVID-era crime wave recedes.

What are the sources used to measure the crime stats?

Did collection of data or filtering change ?

Trump, like many other populists, are not speaking to urban city dwellers when it comes to these topics. He's aiming his speech at the rural population. The idea is of course to keep them scared, and keep them away from the cities.

This is not only a US thing. I grew up in rural nowhere, and frequently see (unfortunately older) people from back home write the craziest posts about the things that are "happening" in big cities.

Some of them are so afraid that they simply won't visit those places - in fear that they'll get mugged, stabbed, or raped by some psychotic foreigner or gang member.

They get all their news from the same far-right FB pages and "news" websites that only write about crime.

> Why it matters: The drop in violent crime puts a serious dent in one of the most frequently used lines of attack by former President Trump and his allies, who have sought to tie Democrats to the issue since 2020.

I imagine in a few years there will be reports of police departments and various reporting agencies to "not report that" and the order "comes from the top".

It's hard to take such a conspiracy theory credibly. Police are consistently conservative with a strong authoritarian bent. Even in so-called "blue" cities, cops vote Trump. Thin blue line, defund, all that.

To suppose that the police have been consistently, across the entire country, coordinating this massive coverup for the sake of Democratic talking points, is beyond absurd. Not a single Trump-loving whistleblower, across how many police departments in the country? Absurd.

conveniently timed article
yup, and gun ownership rates are at an all-time high

maybe they really are inversely correlated

Nope, in fact, gun ownership has been on a steady decline since the 80s.

https://www.rand.org/research/gun-policy/gun-ownership.html

Data like this has to be taken with a grain of salt, since it is largely sourced from conducting polls (as did those at RAND, whom you sourced).

We can say the per-capita number of people who tell a complete stranger that they own a gun has declined since the 80s. Growth in the number of background checks (NICS) has vastly outpaced population growth, however [1, 2]. Many gun owners own more than one firearm, further complicating the picture.

1. https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/nics_firearm_checks_-_mo...

2. https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/dec/popchange...

I think it's fair to say that this data doesn't give you a true percentage of gun ownership. However, I'd also say it's probably fair to say this data is likely at least somewhat correlated with true gun ownership. I don't think there's any significant factors that'd make people more or less likely to lie about ownership over the years.
> I don't think there's any significant factors that'd make people more or less likely to lie about ownership over the years.

I think there is: political polarization. Gun ownership seems like a fact that could get you othered, which would make people less likely to talk about it with strangers.

I can think of several reasons why gun owners would be more likely to deny ownership when surveyed the biggest being the increased political focus on regulation.
Thanks for the hard data. It looks like there was a decline from 1980 to 2000 and then it's been stable since.
Yeah, that's what I see as well. Steady decline is probably the wrong way to phrase it.
So when Trump moved from DC to mar-a-Lago crime rate in big cities dropped...
My state can't find police officers. Being a police officer used to be a highly coveted role, even in the city, despite the risks. Applications to the state and local academies are down 80%, and there aren't enough people coming into the system (even if all of them pass) to replace those leaving it.

Axios has shown its anti-Trump bias in the past. I'm going to take this report with a huge grain of salt.

I live in a tier 1 suburb, and we have seen crime skyrocket this summer, mostly petty theft, but people seem to be getting desperate (stealing dogs and "rehoming" them is becoming very common), and the crime is coming deep into more affluent areas. Is crime lower compared to the first 6 months in 23 because of the Kia thefts? How does this compare to 22/21, etc?

> Applications to the state and local academies are down 80%, and there aren't enough people coming into the system (even if all of them pass) to replace those leaving it.

Where can I verify these claims?

"The thing I have noticed is when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. There's something wrong with the way you are measuring it". —Jeff Bezos <https://sports.yahoo.com/amazon-ceo-jeff-bezos-explains-2123...>