Why do Americans always think crime is going up?

“It’s a vicious cycle,” Rahman said. “There’s a latent concern about crime — it always sits there as a second-tier issue for voters. And if you play upon that as a politician, and you campaign and you really spark fear around the issue, you watch it grow as a top voting issue. That’s absolutely what happens.”

Today, “law-and-order” campaigns aren’t limited to presidential hopefuls. Candidates for local and statewide office routinely emphasize or overstate crime, and that includes Democrats as well. Eric Adams, the Democratic mayor of New York City, for example, was elected in 2021 after running a campaign that focused on crime and vowed to beef up law enforcement. Since then, both he and Kathy Hochul, the Democratic governor of New York, have emphasized crime as a very serious problem, imposing tough-on-crime policies, even though crime has been declining in the city.

Adams’s 2021 campaign “was centered on one thing and one thing alone, which was crime,” Rahman said, adding that his rhetoric caused media mentions of crime to skyrocket. “It literally tracked with voter surveys about voters’ concerns about crime.”

Indeed, as the campaign went on, crime became increasingly salient, eventually becoming the single most important issue for Democratic primary voters in that race. Between April and May of that year, the share of voters who considered crime and public safety to be their top concern rose by 14 percentage points, according to a NY1/Ipsos poll.

When politicians repeatedly bring up crime, the media inevitably responds by covering it. But news outlets, and local media in particular, also often focus a lot of their attention on crime.

“One of the challenges, historically, with the way that we have covered crime is that we usually just cover individual incidents, and there’s very little context for how crime trends are moving overall in our communities,” said Cheryl Thompson-Morton, director of the Black Media Initiative for the Center for Community Media at the City University of New York’s journalism school.

Media outlets dedicate entire sections to coverage of crime, making it a significant part of Americans’ news digest. While journalists should certainly cover crime in their communities, the way that it’s often so prominently featured and prioritized might make people feel like it’s a constant problem that never subsides. Today, there’s also the added layer of social media.

One recent example is the shoplifting panic. A perceived spike in shoplifting — bolstered by faulty data — received a lot of media attention. Story after story in media outlets called the supposed phenomenon an epidemic, and alleged that shoplifting was becoming normalized in many US cities. Viral videos of people brazenly shoplifting without facing any consequences likely helped fuel the panic, making it seem like that kind of petty theft is extremely common. Those kinds of videos also often drew news outlets’ attention, resulting in even more stories.

As more data was collected, however, it became clear that while there may have indeed been an increase in shoplifting, it was hardly as severe as the reports suggested. In fact, in many places, shoplifting seems to have been declining just as these news reports were coming out.

By the time it was clear that the shoplifting wave had been overstated, it was already too late. Despite an effort by many media outlets to correct the record, many Americans had already formed an impression it was a problem that was spinning out of control. And after years of progressive criminal justice reforms — which included lowering penalties for petty crimes and, in some cases, choosing not to prosecute those cases — many politicians seized on the panic showing a dramatic increase in shoplifting to promote tough-on-crime policies similar to those passed in the 1990s, including by lowering the threshold for what constitutes a felony.

“Covering these individual incidents of crime often, as we typically do, often do not help make people feel safer,” Thompson-Morton said.

One problem with the way politicians talk about crime and with the way the media covers it is that they often focus on incidents that will grab people’s attention. That’s likely why the Bush campaign, for example, chose to exploit the Willie Horton case — precisely because it played to people’s fears about prisoners and old racist tropes about Black men.

When crimes that might be relatively rare are given outsized weight in the media, people start to believe that they’re more common than they actually are. It also leads to a vicious feedback loop: Tough-on-crime politicians repeatedly talk about a case, media outlets cover it, and people become extremely interested in it, encouraging politicians to continue exploiting the case and more media coverage.

Take the case of Laken Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student who was killed earlier this year. The story played into Republicans’ narrative about immigration — Trump started his 2016 campaign talking about how people crossing the southern borders were criminals and rapists — because the alleged killer had entered the United States illegally. The case became so prominently featured in Republican campaigns that President Joe Biden mentioned it in his State of the Union address, after Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene confronted him about it.

Studies show, however, that immigrants aren’t more likely to commit crimes than native-born citizens. In fact, some studies show that immigrants might be less likely to commit crimes than people born in the US. But when one horrific incident like Laken Riley’s is sensationalized, it can quickly affect public opinion: One poll, for example, showed that the majority of Americans believe that migration is leading to more crime, despite all evidence that points to the contrary.

So while law-and-order campaigns feed off sensationalizing crime, they are often actually about something else: stirring up fear of a changing society.

As with his previous campaigns, Trump has spent a lot of time talking about crime, despite falling crime rates, and he’s likely to bring it up during his debates with Biden.

Regardless of where crime rates actually stand, the fact that so many people believe that crime is not only a serious problem but one that’s actively getting worse has resulted in Republicans and Democrats trying to prove their tough-on-crime bona fides. Even officials in the Biden administration, for example, have told progressives that they went “too far” on criminal justice reforms and that they should look for a more “sensible approach.”

That means that between now and November, and potentially beyond, both parties are likely to push for tougher laws and harsher enforcement.

But whatever candidates will say about combating crime, one thing is clear: Crime isn’t actually getting worse – even if the majority of Americans think it is.