Perceptions of Crime Are Shifting

Gallup's annual poll shows some positive change.

Gallup released its annual poll gauging how people perceive crime — both locally and nationally. I’ve written about both perceptions of crime broadly and Gallup’s annual poll, and I created a podcast designed to discuss the perceptions issue specifically (which you should listen to), so sufficient to say that I think it’s important to try and make perceptions of crime match reality.

Crime — and especially murder — is falling in the United States in 2025 just as it did in 2024 and 2023. The drops in 2025 may end up being historic in size. So it’s encouraging to see that perceptions of crime are starting to match reality. Less than 50 percent of respondents said that crime had risen nationally in the last year, the first time under 50 since 2001 (note: there was no poll in 2012). Similarly, only 30 percent of respondents said crime rose in the last year locally, also the lowest share since 2001.

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This Week On The Jeff-alytics Podcast

In the most recent episode, I talk with former Kentucky state senator Whitney Westerfield about triplets and the data-informed case for criminal justice reform. Check it out!

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Partisanship is playing a bit of a role in the changing perception nationally. Republicans went from an absurd 90 percent saying crime rose in the last year in 2024 (when murder fell at a historic clip) to 54 percent this year. Independents also fell considerably, but Democrats rose from 29 percent in 2024 (the lowest for any party recorded in a year by this poll) to 46 percent (the third lowest).

Politicization has played a role in this question for most of the last 25 years. Fewer people from the party holding the presidency have said that crime has risen in the last year compared to the out-of-power party in every year since 2000 with the exception of 2001, 2020 and 2025. So it’s no shock that there was a large drop in Republicans and smaller but still sizable increase in Democrats saying crime had risen in the last year. But 2025 is still an outlier with Republicans in power and a higher share of Republicans say crime rose in the last year.

When I wrote about this poll in 2023, one of my chief complaints is that the word “crime” is quite vague and poorly defined. One person can correctly deduce that murder is falling while auto theft is rising, how should they answer the question? Fortunately, Gallup does have some questions that break down by specific crime types which I think highlight how little falling crime in America over the last 25 years has been reflected in how people perceive it.

Gallup asks “How often do you, yourself, worry about the following things” with a few crimes that we can measure listed. Here is the share of people saying they frequently or occasionally worry about personally being the victim of murder, being mugged (robbery), residential burglary, and auto theft between 2000 and 2025:

In 2025, 22 percent of respondents said they frequently or occasionally worried about getting murdered (8 percent frequently), 29 percent worry about getting robbed (10 percent frequently), 34 percent worry about being having their home burglarized (12 percent frequently), and 39 percent worry about having their car stolen or broken into (14 percent frequently).

The actual decline in those crimes, though, is substantially larger than the change in worry. Take residential burglary, for example. Gallup’s poll found that 49 percent of people worried about residential burglary frequently of occasionally in 2010 and a slightly lower 40 percent worried about it in 2024.

The number of reported residential burglaries, by contrast, have fallen off a cliff over that span. The rate of residential burglaries reported by the FBI has gone from 454 per 100k in 2010 to 114 per 100k in 2024, a 75 percent drop.

But, wait, you might say that residential burglaries are underreported like all property crimes. That’s true, but the National Crime Victimization Survey shows an identical drop in burglaries “At or Near Victim’s Home”.

My guess is that doorbell cameras — Ring was first introduced in 2014 — have made it considerably harder to burglarize homes. At the same time, the cameras make it possible to see everything happening outside your home and you can read about whatever crime might occur in your neighborhood on sites like NextDoor. These actual crimes are plunging while people’s perceptions are only slightly falling.

The main takeaway from all of this for me is that perceptions of crime are malleable. This newsletter, the RTCI, the podcast (which you should listen to!), the YouTube channel (new episodes coming soon!) are my way of trying to influence perceptions so that they can more closely match what is borne out in the data.

Influencing perceptions over the long run is a challenge, but I think that Gallup’s poll shows that it’s a doable task. Crime data is more accessible now than ever before, so the key is in using that information to communicate the trends — good and bad — so that anecdote loses come control over perceptions to hard facts.

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Quick housekeeping note, I’m still playing around with how best to present the podcast using the newsletter. Rather than separate weekly posts, I may put the most recent podcast towards the top of each week’s post and do a monthly roundup post to avoid spamming people with two posts every week. Let me know what you think!