Behind the Glass: Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics
“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
My local (Kroger-affiliated) grocery store has changed a lot over the past five years. One of those changes is the giant banner on the front of the building advertising job openings with pay starting at $17/hour. That is a huge increase from a few years ago, and it’s one of many similar explanations for the fact that the entry-level demographic joins the top ten percent (thanks to tech stocks and home values) in believing that inflation hasn’t been the problem that everyone in the middle thinks it is.
But that’s not the only change. It’s now been a few years since a security gate was installed across the entrance, preventing people from exiting the store without passing through the checkout area. This comes on the heels of decades of open-fronted grocery stores throughout much of America. It’s a jarring change.
At the same time, security cameras and screens were added to the self-checkouts, so that shoppers now watch themselves. The monitors were accompanied by intimidating “you are being monitored” lettering. But just a few weeks ago, it became apparent that even that wasn’t enough. New circular cameras are now suspended above each checkout, allowing for a broader view of shoppers’ every move.
The TSA would be proud.
Despite all this, employees freely discuss their known repeat-offenders - people who load full carts and walk out of the store without the slightest hesitation. We’ve come a long way - not a good way, but a long way - from the days when Kevin McCallister was chased across a skating rink for shoplifting a toothbrush.
There are other recent changes. Shopping bags are banned for being bad for the environment (which is backwards) and cold storage is all glassed-in to save energy, but the expensive - and still futile - security measures are the most noteworthy. It’s an upper middle-class area; why has all of this come to make sense to Kroger’s corporate bean-counters?
It’s not just supermarkets, of course. California’s absurd “go ahead, steal up to $950 worth of stuff” legislation has famously added security glass and window bars to local retailers. Not that it’s enough - the culture of theft has become widespread, and the losses have become outrageous. The “fact checkers” tell us that claims of open season are fake news, but retailers have a hard time believing that when no one is ever prosecuted.
Just last week I went to Lowe’s and found electrical wire - wire - all locked out of reach (see cover image).
It’s not just theft that’s exploded now that the “social contract” is clearly null and void. People all over the Western world understand that the risk of violent crime is very different from what it used to be. Well, unless they live in Democrat bubbles and read the approved media, that is. Many a left-wing source reports that federal aggregates of crime data show crime plunging, and few of us can say that such rhetoric hasn’t found its way into our feeds. How can those claims be made?
First, the FBI’s crime database - once the gold standard - has undergone updates, and the consequence of those updates is that data for much of America is simply missing:
When the FBI first unveiled the hate crime numbers, it looked like they had dropped significantly. But the report missed hate crimes from nearly 40% of law enforcement agencies in the country, and the agency faced outcry from experts and policymakers who said the numbers were “worse than meaningless.”
Political actors with an interest in understating crime have gleefully reported the FBI’s totals without mentioning the incomplete data.
That’s only the beginning of the problem. As National Review details in an article that’s well worth its paywall, crime reporting is way down, crimes are far more frequently classified as lesser offenses, and arrest rates have cratered (leaving offenders undeterred and free to reoffend).
Even murders are sometimes reclassified as lesser offenses for the purpose of improving the numbers. Excerpts:
Harris got a tap on the shoulder, then a punch in the face, according to the police report. Moments later, he was on the sidewalk, taking repeated punches and kicks and blows to the head with a metal pipe. When the beatdown finally ended, Harris told a witness that he couldn’t feel his legs. … On March 21, six days after the beating, Harris died. Police recorded the Maurice Harris case as a battery, which is indisputably true. But not as a homicide. … The police report summarized the pathologist’s findings: “The victim showed no significant evidence of injuries sustained from the battery [and] that in no way did it appear that the battery contributed to the cause of his death and therefore ruled his death as natural.”
Maurice Harris was black, but this was not exactly the George Floyd standard.
Back to the National Review article, because I’ve buried the lede. The novel revelation here is the massive divergence between the FBI’s National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) data and the FBI’s crime data. Prior to the Biden presidency, there was a strong correlation between reported crimes and reported crime victimization, which is what you’d expect. But not since 2020…
From 2008 to 2019, the FBI and NCVS measures of reported violent crimes generally tended to move up and down together. But from 2020 to 2022, these two numbers were almost perfectly negatively correlated to each other (-0.9599). Each time one measure of reported violent crimes rose, the other measure fell.
While the FBI’s number of reported violent crimes fell by 2 percent in 2021 and 2.1 percent in 2022, the NCVS’s measure showed increases of 13.6 percent and 29.3 percent, respectively. When even these two measures of the same thing — reported crime — are going in opposite directions, there are real concerns about the FBI data.
Law enforcement reports decrease; victims’ reports increase. How about that!
It’s hard to quantify the cost to society of creating an environment where prolific offenders go un-prosecuted, but the cost is large, and it can’t be expected to show up in arrest statistics because the lack of arrests is the primary cause of the problem.
A society that is moving in this direction doesn’t become a place where crime statistics increase. It becomes a society full of dashcams; a place where everyone simply understands that bad things are very likely to happen and protection needs to be a constant consideration. A place like the South American countries where people don’t stop at stop signs at night because they expect kidnappers or carjackers to attack them if they do. When this sort of danger is normalized, people can adapt enough to keep actual victimizations from becoming too statistically terrible.
But that doesn’t mean that nothing has changed.
And it still has a huge cost.
A final note on the specific harm done by lax prosecution of criminals - including repeat offenders - comes to us courtesy of Ireland. Three young men who had over two hundred convictions between them remained free due to idiotic law enforcement. Normally this story ends with a horrific crime, but in this case, the Leinster province of Ireland got lucky. Its three prolific offenders killed themselves by doing what they had always done - displaying a wanton disregard for the law. But that’s not the interesting part.
What’s interesting is what changed after their deaths:
In the Laois/ Offaly Garda Division there were 19 non- aggravated burglaries in August compared to 39 in June when the gang were said to be “very much active”.
There were 60 recorded burglaries in the two counties in June this year – but this more than halved last month, dropping to 27. Twenty-nine incidents were recorded in July.
Officers do not believe there is a seasonal reason that could account for the drop in burglaries.
“Gardai are certain that the very low figures in the counties over the summer are directly linked to the fact that these individuals are no longer with us as well as the fact that there has been some very significant arrests in the last few months,” said a source.
Leinster province is hardly the only place in the world where most crime is committed by repeat offenders, and where a small number of very-frequent offenders commit a significant percentage of region’s crimes all by themselves. The declines in crime in Leinster serve as evidence that as many convictions as the three scofflaws secured, they seemed to have committed far more crimes that were never tied to them than crimes that were.
Just like the known repeat-offenders at my grocery store who never pay for anything, and are never pursued.
It’s hard to quantify the cost to society of creating an environment where prolific offenders go un-prosecuted, where reporting crimes (or pursuing thieves) is no longer seen as worth doing, and where the law-abiding are now expected to change their lives to accommodate the lawless. But the cost is large, and it can’t be expected to show up in arrest statistics because the lack of arrests is the primary cause of the problem.
Additional reading:
https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/08/a-criminal-mystery/
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2023/07/13/fbi-crime-rates-data-gap-nibrs
https://www.chicagomag.com/chicago-magazine/chicago-crime-statistics/chicago-crime-rates/