re: #17 Joe Bacon ✅

If you read the article, the UofC guy Roman is saying that people perceive crime as going up erroneously because they also erroneously view disorder as danger.

This doesn’t solve the question of what amounts to disorder…but I’d also observe that the stated 77% of people that think crime is going up is not people in cities, but people polled nationally that whose working knowledge is what they see in media, which strongly suggests that the perception of more crime amounts to…Americans viewing all kinds of shit as amorphously dangerous because it is unfamiliar to their suburban (but convinced they’re rural) lifestyle.

So…protests, but also homelessness, but also just big crowds of people being boisterous.

I realize that’s a guess, but I’m trying to demonstrate that the semantic gap isn’t necessarily malicious, and (anecdote is not data) I’m doing so in a way that’s consistent with my own experience being from a small town where everyone expected going to UofC in Hyde Park for college was a death sentence. White people in suburbs in the US have an absolute conviction that the rest of the world is a place where terrible things happen constantly, to the point of being more weather than tragedy, and cling to that notion such that they only ever hear that things in unfamiliar places are getting worse.

(Sidebar: seven years ago I went to Prague and a large number of people I know were afraid I’d be harmed by terrorists. I tried to assuage them by telling the biggest risk I was facing was bottle services scams at any of the clubs that were on the town’s huge stag party circuit. You literally cannot convince Americans the rest of the world isn’t just different genres of horror movie)