Comment by UncleMeat

It is amazing to me that we have have failed so completely to report on the miraculous drop in crime rates over the past 30 years. People consistently report that crime is up, even when presented with contradictory evidence.

A major part of the problem, in my estimation, is that a lot of people don't actually perceive crime as crime but instead perceive divergence from their expected social hierarchies as crime. This is how you get people saying that crime in DC is high because they saw a person that looked homeless sitting on the metro. Although sitting on the metro is legal, a poor person doesn't "belong" there so this is seen as evidence of crime.