In short, the crime anxiety industry’s simplistic, cops-and-robbers conception of which types of people commit crimes, and how those people should be punished, bears little resemblance to the chaotic reality of our leviathan-like carceral apparatus.
But this hasn’t stopped Americans from often conceiving of crime in one-dimensional terms. As institutions have failed to stem the tide of homelessness, addiction, and mental illness, and as the crime anxiety industry churns on all fronts—the neverending IV drip of 24-hour news, apps like Citizen and NextDoor that pump a constant drip of supposed crime updates into peoples’ phones, true-crime content, and craven “ crime watch” social media accounts—public perception across the country seems to indicate that many believe the barbarians are at the gates.
This is nothing new. During the 1970s and ’80s, the so-called “Golden Age” of serial killers and child abductions, it was institutions like the FBI that manufactured the kind of Stranger Danger paranoia that colors our collective imagination about The Criminal. At one point in time, mass media and the Bureau taught us to believe that fiendish sadists conducted thousands of ritualistic homicides every year, only for it to be revealed that such cases contributed to less than 1 percent of murders.
These extreme cases of harm, as the historian and author of Stranger Danger: Family Values, Childhood, and the American Carceral State Paul Renfro told me, rewire our understanding of our shared social space. Cases like the abduction and murder of children become tabloid fodder—exaggerating the dangers of the world as a whole.
“It creates this set of reference points that enable people to think that they know, on a first name basis, in this kind of parasocial way, people like Jacob Wetterling, and the families that are affected. And that shapes their behavior,” Renfro said.
“It shapes how they understand, how they craft narratives about the world. And because they’re so visceral and have this emotional resonance…they are always going to trump…or kind of override these clinical explanations, right?”
Recent polling bears this out: It indicates that concerns about crime have reached highs not seen since the early ’90s, when crime numbers reached their zenith across the country. This is all despite the recent resurgence in crimes—in some places, in some categories, among some demographics—being nowhere near as prevalent.