How Dangerous Is the World?

Is there a crime wave? Are the cities overrun? Does it matter?

Americans seem to always think crime is going up. We’re just ingrained with that “kids these days” folklore which holds that every generation is a little more unhinged than the one before. Last year, Gallup found that 56 percent of us think crime is up in our local communities, while almost 80 percent think it’s up nationwide. In other words, “yes, crime is going up. And it’s mostly going up” gestures vaguely “out there.” 

The “out there” in this case is the cities, which cable news has painted as crumbling dystopias ruled by genderless communists and CRT while defunded police departments sit by helplessly. Obviously, Fox News has driven a lot of this “the cities are burning” panic, but it wouldn’t be fair to blame just Fox News. The San Francisco hit job was a mainstream media team effort, united in propping up the story of an organized crimewave driving Walgreens to ruin that we now know was bogus. 

But crime is kind of up, isn’t it? A little? Or at least, some kinds of crime? The world is a dangerous place, after all. And shouldn’t we do something about that? How dangerous is the world?

How we think about this question is important, not just to get a clearer picture of what direction things are headed around these parts but also so that we can have a clearer picture of the people we live around. Crime is, after all, just people. People who are breaking the law or, at least, are accused of breaking the law. People who were made in the image of God and created for eternal happiness in perfect community. Any time spent trying to better understand them is time well spent. 

It’s also worth asking how dangerous the world is because the answer will tell us something about God’s creation. If we can say that danger is in inverse proportion to goodness, than we can put the question another, more daunting way: How beautiful is the world?

Is Crime on the Rise?

So, let’s start by addressing the actual crime rate. Is it going up or not? It’s a harder question to answer than you might think. The FBI releases an annual report on the state of crime, which would seem helpful, but only 63 percent of the nation’s police departments bothered to submit their data. Among the police departments that didn’t file their data: Los Angeles and the Big Apple itself, baby. 

So we’ve got a fuzzy picture at best, and what we do have doesn’t really follow any straightforward narrative. Property crime (theft, shoplifting, burglary, car stuff) is down, and has been going down for a long time. Violent crime (assault, murder, rape) went up a little during the pandemic and is now going back down, but has remained way, way below 1990s levels. 

But when people think crime, they tend to think murder. It’s a relatively small percentage of the crime picture, making up about 0.2% of all crime. But it went up a lot in 2020 and 2021. There was a 30% increase from 2019 to 2020 and then another slight bump from 2020 to 2021. Early data suggests that the murder rate has been on its way back down since then and it’s still nowhere near 1990s rates. But it did happen. 

There are two things to note about what we’ll call the murder bump. The first is that 2020 and 2021 were unusual, as years go. Pandemic lockdown saved a lot of lives, but it also removed social safety nets and support structures from people who relied on community. 

The other thing to note is that this murder bump does not conform to a convenient political narrative. It was more or less uniform in cities and rural areas, red and blue countries, Trump states and Biden states. 

So, there’s not exactly a crimewave. At least, not one without several asterisks behind it. But even that doesn’t really tell the full story, because most of us are operating with an antiquated and not very useful definition of crime.