Originally published at: Bad news for MAGA grifters: violent crime has decreased over the last two years, but hate crime is up | Boing Boing
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Anti-transgender hate crimes were up 32.9%.
Their plan is working.
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Unfortunately, people who get their news from Fox, NewsMax, Facebook, Xitter, et al, will never hear this story. They will only hear “THEY’RE COMING FOR YOU!!!”
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But what about getting murder mixed up in your hate crimes (shooting trans folks in clubs and bars, Black folks on your porch, etc.)?
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Yep. There was an uptick due to the pandemic, but it appears to be trending downwards again. Overall there has been a downward trend since the 90s.
But you get the high profile stuff, like videos of Glock switches in Chicago, or videos where people close streets down to do donuts, etc, and it really skews your cognitive bias. (And those things ARE issues, they just aren’t end of civilization issues.) And per capita is how one should follow crime stats, but with growing populations, your per capita rate can be the same or even go down, but the number of instances goes up, which again will effect your perception.
Combine that with grifters and fascists who want to sell you the solution to all of this, and you get a very warped view of reality, which one uses to justify their hate.
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“Bad news for MAGA grifters”
But why would it be? They’ve shown, repeatedly, that they simply don’t care what the facts are, and are willing to make up whatever narrative suits their purposes. Downward trends have been obvious for a while, but that hasn’t changed their rhetoric. That the murder rate went up, briefly, is enough.* That some particular crime rate is up (even if it was, say, jaywalking) from a few years ago would be enough for the right-wingers to bleat about how “crime is up!” and imply people’s lives were at risk. (I was about to say that using the increase in hate crimes would be a statistic whose use would be too shameless even for them, but it really isn’t - I fully expect some conservative to blame Biden for that. “He’s dividing America! Something, something, identity politics!!1!”)
*That it’s pretty clearly a result of the fact that people bought more guns during the start of the pandemic doesn’t contribute to right-wing narratives, so they ignore that.
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Yeah this is a lot of misunderstanding of statistics and how to read them along with how to look for BS in the first place (oh hey look who’s been cutting budgets and demonizing education for 40+ years…).
Add on to that that yes, violent crime IS up in very specific cases (uptick in some rural areas in red states and this is per capita) and of course hate crimes. MAGA screams that violent crime is up because their people are the ones doing the crimes. They’re just blaming it on people in “cities” who aren’t them, and then Jason Aldean makes a video that makes MAGA want to go do more crimes against the other… thus increasing the crime rate. Ugh.
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Rural and small town crime rates also have their issues with how they are perceived because of the much smaller sample size.
So like in my home town where my parents live, they had a murder/suicide 7 or so years ago. In a town of <10,000 people that suddenly makes the town look like it has a much higher murder rate than the much larger city of Wichita a county over which has been having about 35 murders a year.
The next year that rate went back and has stayed at zero. So if you just look at a single year’s statistics, it would give a much different perception than looking at a larger trend.
And no matter where you live, one will tend to judge how safe the city you live in by your own experiences. A person in a statistically high city or small town maybe not feel like it is actually dangerous because they aren’t in the area that is “bad”, or cognitive bias excusing “isolated incidents.”
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Yep this. Also easy to excuse away if you know the people involved (directly or by reputation) because they “were a bad seed”, “got into drugs”, or “were sent here from the city and brought the gangs and drugs with them”.
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