Another day, another ridiculous conversation about stranger abductions

[conuly]

If one more person tries to conflate child abductions with child trafficking I will not be responsible for my actions. These are two different problems! Different and, as near as I can tell, entirely unrelated.

Relatedly, if you're going to laugh when I tell you the crime rate has decreased, you'd better be able to back up your response with the numbers. I'll wait.

Ugh. I've asked this before and never gotten a satisfactory response: Why do people want to be scared? Why are they just so resistant to hearing anything but "be afraid" every waking moment!?

Comments

[redbird]

Sometimes I think the question is "why do they want you to be scared?" What are they trying to sell? Fences? Guns? A specific politician? And admitting that they want you to be scared would undercut their agenda.

And sometimes I think people don't want to told they were wrong, and specifically don't want to be told that it would have been fine/safe to do X thing that they avoided because they were worried about an overblown or nonexistent threat.

[frandroid]

It's not that they want to be scared, it's that they have a right-wing authoritarian bent, and the "crime is increasing" is post-facto justification for the fact that they want an autocrat to run everything because in their minds, that makes society more orderly. Even though in most cases, that just makes society more corrupt and dysfunctional, but try to convince them of that in 4 sentences...

[conuly]

Well, I wish they'd just stop, rather than making themselves and everybody around them miserable.

[conuly]

Mmm. That explains some of them, but this sort of fear infests the left too.

[frandroid]

Some left-wingers are RWAs, they just don't know what that is and aren't self-aware. Many communists in particular. They cries for "democracy!!!" are really cries of "why don't you do what I want" when you probe them a bit.

[sabotabby]

I think we all suffer from Scared Prey Brain. Self-awareness interrogates that. Like we all have an emotional reaction to "holy shit bad things happening to children"—it's deeply biological. But the critical reaction, based on *gestures vaguely at all of history*, is to take 5 seconds and question whether or not this is likely a true story or nah.

[redbird]

It would be nice.

[james]

Sometimes people "want to be scared" because they think it's the same thing as being ready and alert in case something happens. Like, if you relax and stop thinking about danger you're more likely to be unable to protect yourself. Which is blatantly not true, but it's what they believe.

[altamira16]

I think that the willingness to spread fake "OMG my child was almost kidnapped in the Ikea by a man who followed us through the store" memes is something beyond a political axis. (There are arrows directing you through Ikea. People follow the same path through the store.)

Child trafficking has become the black hole of crimes. Other crimes are just now called child trafficking now. Underage prostitution? Child trafficking. Child abduction (by someone who is not the noncustodial parent presumably)? Child trafficking.

[tielan]

I wonder if there's an element of "if you weren't afraid, then you could be doing more to make the world a better place"?

Being afraid and fearful and then having things to do to alleviate that fear absolves us of the need to make things better for those outside our 'fortifications', because we're too busy digging our own trenches and fortifying our own ground.

[low_delta]

I was just talking about a related issue, in the watch out for razor blades in Halloween candy world. People who freak out about the possibility, however unlikely, can do something about it. They can inspect their kids' candy carefully, or take it to get x-rayed or whatever. So of all the things they are worried about in this world, this one is manageable, so they feel better.

[siderea]

I think I might disagree with you pretty fundamentally on this one. I think (white) anxiety about crime is not baseless, but a reflection of the growing awareness that the cops have been doing nothing about what anyone would think is actual crime, and have instead been playing cops and robbers with drug dealers, and largely cooking the books where crime statistics are concerned.

I don't think we've really reckoned with what it has done to American consciousness about policing and crime for it to have gotten out that there are so many tens of thousands of unprocessed rape kits in cities around the US. Given that women, and particularly white women, are the demographic typically most concerned with safety from crime, finding out that the crime they've most been concerned about has been effectively abandoned by law enforcement... I don't think all of the response to that is rational, in that I think it has resulted in a general increase in sense of unsafety from crime, but it's not unjustified.

Of course nothing about school shootings, and mass murders in general, make that demographic feel any safer. It's hard to argue that the crime rate has gone down while the fact that the rate of mass murder has gone up is headline news.

Additionally, an awful lot of people have had the experience of their property being stolen – particularly cars and bicycles – and the police doing nothing for them. I think there's a general dawning awareness in the white middle class that the police are useless, and protect them from nothing.

And then there's the fact that online crimes are generally perpetrated without any sort of law enforcement; indeed they may not actually even be crimes. For reasons I am often unclear on, things that would be unambiguously crimes when committed face-to-face or via a telephone somehow are not crimes one committed online. And even where laws exist, law enforcement is often inept and disinterested.

And then there's SWATting.

And then there's corporate crime. Trump has been a fascinating example to the public of that. It is only now that he's being brought to justice, but there's endless stories about him stiffing contractors he is hired. There is a general awareness that he has gotten away with figurative murder for a very long time, and it was only because he finally antagonized powerful interests that he has been hauled into court.

I don't think one can coherently hold the belief both that the cops are crooked and that we have any idea whatsoever what the crime rate is. The claimed crime rate is a function of what the cops tell us the crime rate is. We have no other source for that information. If, as has been documented happening in NYC, police artificially decrease the number of crime reports by refusing to accept reports of crimes to make it look like they're doing a good job at preventing crime to justify their existence, then we have no idea how much actual crime is happening out there.

I would not at all be surprised to find out that actually crime levels are increasing. Police haven't seemed to be very interested in pursuing crimes against individuals for quite some time, so there doesn't seem to be much deterrent effect on crime. Perhaps it is cynical of me, but it seems that it would be a lot easier for the police to just discourage or "lose" reports of crimes rather than actually, you know, engage in policing.

So on the one hand, we have a lot of evidence of certain kinds of crime we actually consider crime being on the upswing; on the other hand we have a lot of evidence of the failure of law enforcement to even attempt to address those crimes, and in some cases evidence that they actually suppress the reporting of crimes for their own reasons.

I don't think it's unreasonable to be anxious about one's personal security and angry that one's society is unconcerned with private citizens' security, in light of all of these things. Obviously, I think a lot of anxiety and anger about crime gets displaced onto scapegoats, and that's several kinds of bad. But it's weird to me that a lot of people on the left simultaneously believe that cops can't be trusted about crime, and insist crime is going down based on... what the cops tell us.

[heron61]

Exactly - fear drives people to spend more time on social media, so social media companies prioritize content that makes people afraid, and of course in the US, fearful people are more likely to vote for GOP fascists, so the GOP promotes fear (as, of course, does Faux News).

[conuly]

We have no other source for that information.

I wouldn't say that. One easily sourced proxy is polling. Gallup consistently finds that the majority of Americans believe that crime is up nationally but only a minority believe it is up in their own community.

This is obviously nonsensical. If crime was really up, surely the majority of Americans would believe that it's up in their own community, whether or not they thought it was up nationally.

And honestly, it's not polling, but informally I've found, over the past two decades or so, that if you ask people in this sort of hysteria if they personally have been the victim of a violent crime* or if anybody they know personally has in the past year, nearly all of them say "no". They haven't been the victim of a violent crime. Nobody they know has been. If they're at all like the people being polled, they think crime isn't up where they live. Why do they think crime is increasing?

* Because people really only care about violent crimes. They ought to care about white collar crimes, but they don't. I'm not even sure they actually care about theft all that much unless they can claim it's violent or it happens to them. A lot of them don't even seem to care about violent crime unless it's done by a stranger. It's fascinatingly weird.

[conuly]

Yeah, except that there are actual real-world costs to Stranger Danger, and it's harmful to society.

[conuly]

Okay, so child trafficking has always meant underage prostitution, even without a middleman. It has never meant abduction.

A lot of people get that very backwards, but the definition of trafficking used by the DoJ or other official organizations is very clear on that point. If a teenager trades sex for something, that's trafficking, even if they're trafficking themself.

[hudebnik]

I'd like to hypothesize that crime becomes people's primary economic concern whenever unemployment isn't -- even though unemployment almost certainly causes a lot of crime through various channels. US unemployment, at least the official number (which doesn't adequately consider "underemployment"), is now the lowest it's been in over fifty years, so crime becomes a larger fraction of your worry budget, and it's easy to rationalize "I wasn't obsessing about problem X last year, and I am now, so X must have gotten worse" even if it objectively hasn't.

Another explanation is purely partisan: Republicans generally believe Democrats are "soft on crime", so whenever Democrats are in charge of something (especially the Presidency, even though most crime is local and most criminal law State-level), crime must increase. One might expect a roughly equal-and-opposite politically-driven cycle among Democrats, leading to a flat society-wide average in polls, except that crime is generally lower on Democrats' list of concerns than on Republicans', so the amplitude of the Democrat-side politically-driven cycle is less.

siderea raises an interesting point that official crime statistics are largely provided by the police, who have a vested interest in public perception of those statistics -- either artificially raised to show the need for police, artificially lowered to show how well they're doing, or skewed by which crimes are easiest/most-rewarding to investigate. But I'm not convinced that there's enough public awareness of that to explain the widespread belief that crime is rising on the whole.

[conuly]

But I'm not convinced that there's enough public awareness of that to explain the widespread belief that crime is rising on the whole.

Honestly, and this might be a bit petty, but my personal experience of people who are afraid of crime all the time is that their risk assessment is totally skewed. I've seen them work themselves into a lather over: "a car has parked in front of my house" (nothing bad ever happens to them, but somehow they get in a group and egg each other on that something bad *might* happen anyway) or "my daughter likes to walk her dogs at 6pm - after dark!" or "somebody is leaving mysterious rubber duckies at my child's dorm door" (surprise surprise, it was not a stalker, as 10 people suggested, but her friends playing a prank, as I suggested) or "how can you suggest simply putting a birthday card in your friend's mailbox, that would terrify me" or "a friend thought I might want to meet up in... the city".

None of these things are worth even the tiniest fraction of the energy people put into them. I'm not even sure where some of this is coming from to begin with! (The rubber duckies woman did have a history of being stalked, but the other nine people on the thread had no such excuse for scaring her even more.)

[frandroid]

Irregular border crossing? Human trafficking! Child trafficking!

[silveradept]

I suspect the question of why people want to be afraid is because you are much more likely, in certain jurisdictions and situations, to not be penalized for actions taken out of "fear," many of which are "I feared that I might no longer be the unquestioned ruler of everything" or "I feared that someone 'undeserving' might have obtained wealth, power, or a partner I presume to have some kind of control over."

So it seems less like they want to be afraid of anything and more that they want to have the avenue to claim they were afraid of something to get a sympathetic response as to why they did something horrible to another person.

[dorchadas]

Gallup consistently finds that the majority of Americans believe that crime is up nationally but only a minority believe it is up in their own community.

For a non-crime-but-related statistic, a majority of Americans say that they are personally doing financially better or much better since 2020 but that the overall economy is bad.

[dorchadas]

I saw an article (which I can't find now, of course) about danger to child on Halloween and why you should not let them go trick or treating. And it wasn't about being killed by reckless drivers, of course--it was about someone in a trick or treating house snatching your kid when they go up to the door.