Because of what, the decrease in crime?
Consider how many children were terrified to swim in the ocean after seeing Jaws for the first time... statistics do very little to allay existing (irrational) fears for most people.
People are not afraid of sensational crime next door. They want crime to be happening where political opponents live, so that they can feel good about punishing them.
In summary, everybody has started liking doing everything in a hands-off way via the internet, but also everybody hates it.
That was never possible before. Historically, conversations didn’t leave records, and when they did, they were trivially burned. There was no sense that the police should have access to the records because there were no records.
The technical and ethical problems of this “common sense” are far from obvious to most whose primary exposure to and mode of thinking about policing and technology is what we see on TV.
Tl;dr: violent crime doesn’t mean anything when you have billions, but instability in the system does. Surveillance state tropes exist for a reason, and that’s b/c they add resiliency to a system that would otherwise collapse.
I don't know in which world you're living so here are officials, likely downplayed, numbers for the EU, from an official EU website to get you back to earth:
"In 2023, sexual violence offences, including rape, continued to rise in the EU."
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
Rape numbers are through the roof in France (nearly 40 000 a year now): they went x6 in 20 years.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1072770/number-of-rapes-...
"The number of violent crimes in Germany increased in 2024 with a sharp increase in rapes and sexual assaults.":
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-sees-rise-in-sexual-violence-a...
Thefts and violent thefts are on the rise all across the EU. When I was young I didn't hear about being stabbed to death so that their Rolex could be stolen.
In the city were I grew up in now people firing full-auto AK-47 is a weekly occurrence.
Someone who walks into a major EU city and tells me its safer than it was 20 years is very blind.
Meanwhile the risk of my daughter getting raped is very real. And the fault is as much on the rapists as on the ones who try to refute irrefutable numbers.
> When I was young I didn't hear about being stabbed to death so that their Rolex could be stolen.
Exactly, you didn't hear about it, such violence was quite common in some places, but there was no 24/7 online reporting backed by immediate social media outrage. Things are much much more hysterical now.
The mobile phone created an occupation for people who would otherwise be on the street committing crime. It paced people, even common kids, adults, we commit much, much less crime than the previous generation, and even less in unreported crime (bar fights, revenge against a neighbor, etc.). The boomers used their hands!
But the problem is: If you follow the average strength and fight training of citizen from 1970 to today, violence should have been practically zero. It is much higher because some subsets have abnormally high rates.
You claim the average is going down. OP claims it’s going up. Both are right. Violence wins.
