It's not just politicized propaganda. A lot of unsafety feeling is almost self-inflicted.

In my opinion apps like the Citizen[0] app are some of the worst offenders. They constantly bombard you with scary notifications, creating a constant environment of fear. With that app people are constantly aware of things that are happening in your general area without any real benefit of informing you. It turns the mildly-annoying-but-ignoreable mentally ill person on the street corner from someone that "scares" the 10 people around them into someone that scares 10k people in the area.

Oh, and Citizen is also directly integrated into Axon's Flock-like surveillance product.

[0]: https://citizen.com/

We were. Until about somewhere between 2016 and 2018 at which time crime rates went up significantly. Between the 1970s and the mid 2010s crime consistently went down, year over year across almost every big city. In the last decade however, almost 30 years of crime reduction got reversed in some places. Its inconsistent as some areas show this pattern, others don't. And the main differentiating factor is mostly tactical and on the ground. Meaning it is directly about changes to policing policy. Trying to ignore that this is happening is just gaslighting and it is a major reason that drove voting patterns in the last election.

PS Tracking crime stats is tough as property crime is inconsistently reported. This is why you often see criminologists take murder stats and only murder stats in their analysis and then estimate other crime stats back from that. Basically, once people realize the police won't investigate property crime, they stop reporting things that aren't insured.

I think people need to remember the extreme heterogeneity of crime even in the same city or town let alone across a nation.

I’m not disagreeing with the trend, but it effects people differently.

The usual retort here is that the anxiety driving the adoption of Flock can't be seen in crime statistics (which is mostly measuring partner/family crimes ala "murder rate is down").

The random smattering of shoplifting is never reported, the unhoused man in a fit of rage yelling at passers-by is never filed with the police. But in the privacy of the voting booth, people will vote for more Flock cameras.

Instead of waving off concerns we should be addressing them better.

Some American cities like St Louis, Baltimore, Memphis, New Orleans have averaged about 50 homicides per 100,000 per year over the last 10 years. Detroit averaged about 40.

It is not "unhinged propaganda from the right" for people living in those cities to wonder why the rate cannot be under 2.5 per 100,000 like it is in most European cities. Except for a few years in the early 2000s, London's rate has stayed below 2.5 for the last 250 years.

We can acknowledge that and also acknowledge that a lot of petty crime goes unreported/unresolved because the police can't do anything, and that our target should still be 0 crime and folks are entitled to be upset about any amount of crime. Recent example I have is a work truck behind my neighbors house in the alleyway. Parked for less than 5 minutes, went inside a garage to look at something, came back, and someone had already walked off with their tools. I sort of got the guy who did it on video which I provided to the person who was victimized, but who knows if anything ever really came of it. Probably not. Does that actually show up in crime statistics? I bet it doesn't.

What is also missing here is that even if there is not criminal activity occurring, there is a general influx of highly anti-social behavior occurring that feeds in to the perception that higher rates of criminal activity occurring. This is very noticeable when you see people casually running red lights, driving without registration, yelling and screaming at people on the street or at the bus stop, and more. Even if I'm unlikely to be a victim of a crime, I don't feel safe when these anti-social behaviors are occurring, people are shoplifting and now going to CVS feels like going to a third-world country.

Framing this as right-wing propaganda I believe is a mistake and if you are a leftist it just loses elections for you because even if the folks who are concerned about crime levels are wrong (they're not though) the perception matters much more than reality. Denying the perception implies you deny the reality too and fewer people are going to vote in favor of candidates who tell them that what they see for themselves isn't happening.

Thanks to the border actually not being wide open due to Trump, all violent crime is down across the US

I don’t think public parks in the 1950s in America were filled with used heroin needles and homeless people strung out or defecating.

You can correct me if I’m wrong though.