What's good y'all? You're listening to Code Switch. I'm Gene Demby. So, okay, not that long ago, I was back in Philly, talking to somebody that I grew up with in Philly back in the day. And, you know, we were old and washed now, so we're just commiserating about parent life. You know what I'm saying? Like, they let us be the grownups. Anyway, this person has a tween daughter. And so, you know, they were going through the logistics of having a child and getting him out the house in the morning and then having to deal with your own commute. And so I was like, would your mornings be easier maybe if you let your

tween daughter get on the bus to go to school or walk to school? It's not that far as like a mile

away. And y'all, the way she looked at me, like, have you lost your damn mind?

Do you know how dangerous it is out there?

It's so much worse than it was than we were kids, Gene.

And I was like, was it though?

Was it?

And it was weird to hear that because we grew up in the early 1990s, like in the tail end of the crack era, like objectively a really rough time to be from an inner city. And so the journalist in me kicks in. I'm like, you know, the period we grew up in was the most violent period on record in the United States. And we're now on the safest period on record. And yet, she was not feeling what I was

saying. But I think it's worth underlined in this a little bit, right? Let's sit with this.

According to the sources who keep these numbers, whether that's the FBI or the Federal Bureau

of Justice Statistics, crime in the U.S. has been on a rapid, dramatic decline since the 1990s.

That's property crime.

That's violent crime.

There's been something like a 50% drop in crime.

Since those days, when she and I were tweens, walking and taking the bus to school.

But over that same period, Americans basically always think crime is on the rise, even when it's not, right?

So just imagine in your mind's eye, right?

A graph with two different lines.

One line representing what Americans think is happening with crime ticking up, up, up, up, up all the time.

And the other line showing what's actually happening with crime ticking down, down, down, down, down, in the opposite direction. And I should know now, you cannot really bring data to these conversations. I have these conversations, like, not infrequently, because I live in a big city where lots of people are worried about crime, and because, you know, I host a show about race in

America. And what I come across is that a lot of what people think of as crime, air quotes,

is not actually crime. Like, people will point to homelessness or dirty neighborhoods with lots

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