That's because local news endlessly amplifies whatever crime there is. Propaganda works.
this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2025
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That's because local news is overwhelmingly Sinclair Broadcast Group
That, and there are so many homeless people, everywhere now, that people actually cannot avoid seeing them.
Do homeless people commit all the serious, violent crimes?
No, they're more often victims than perpetrators.
But they are associated with unsafety, with social decay, with drug addiction, they are easy scape goats, and they often are not very pleasant to interact with, they smell bad (I've been homeless this is just a fact not an insult), they dress raggedly.
As with the constant drumbeat of sensational local crime stories, actually walking or driving around outside and seeing homeless people all the time just makes people feel less safe.
Everywhere is a 'bad neighborhood' now, therefore crime must be going up.
Perception of course often does not track with reality, and 'common sense' solutions often don't work at all and make the problem worse, but the average American has a literacy level of a 6th grader, so it makes sense that in aggregate we constantly make easy and wrong assumptions.
That's because rather than petty crime, just as many people if not more are scared of the unaccountable, militarized, discriminatory police forces.
Tale as old as time. Stop watching local corporate news stations, they love cops and their bullshit lies.
I wonder if it has anything to do with a 24 corporate news cycle and social media that is designed to drive up viewership by sensationalizing every story and focusing on fear while either entirely ignoring or poorly representing actual problems in favor of whatever makes them more money with little to no regard for rigid fact checking or aggressively calling out lies when it is inconvenient.
Their social media tells them so.
Crime in Oakland, California went down 34% in 2024. Homicide down 32%. Alameda County (where Oakland, Berkeley, and other east bay cities reside) recalled the DA in the November election. The cognitive dissonance is through the roof.
Perception of safety has a lot more to do with high profile random violence (e.g. the recent well-publicized NYC subway crimes) and general street disorder. Nobody expects to get murdered, but people know they could run into a mentally ill addict or have to sit in a subway car with someone behaving in a scary fashion. I probably have 2 or 3 incidents a month on the subway where I am rattled by someone's behavior. That impacts me more than murders in The Bronx.
Kids murdered gang shooting in the Bronx: sad but somewhere else
Guy pushed onto subway tracks in midtown: shit better watch my back
You're saying a nation of shitebag gun owning cowards feels unsafe and scared of their own shadows?
Is there a way to block inline images
that sucks
Covid and republicans make things unsafe.
well when the major conservative media "news" outlet sells CONSTANT FEAR and FEAR THE BLACK AND BROWN AND GAY AND EVERYONE NOT CONSERVATIVE IS ANTIFA 25/8 and the other legitimate news outlets are deathly afraid for some reason of losing ratings to that propaganda outlet that they parrot the exact same thing but with tamer language (which also kinda de-legitimatizes them to be honest), you get that kind of thing.
also what doesn't help, is the constant blowout coverage of mass shootings that the neworks do (which also strangely are committed by white male conservatives) which also fuels the narrative of rampant violent crime.
I wonder how many gated communities they chose to collect the data from before declaring it's a universal feeling
Experts note that gun violence disproportionately affects Black communities, impacting safety perceptions.
The ironic thing is that it makes white people feel less safe because black people are disproportionately the perpetrators, when instead it should make white people feel safer because black people are disproportionately the victims. The racism only ratchets one way.
Primarily because right-wing media tell them lies again an again.