It just keeps raging out of control. No, not crime. But the narrative that, despite the official word to the contrary, crime is raging out of control. That’s the word from Fox “News”, so that’s the word from the White House and its Cosplay Cabinet. And it’s the word that a large sector of the public believes wholeheartedly. If you’re among those who subscribe to this belief, we have some very bad news. It’s false. Very much so. Just as it has been for years.

We’ve already covered this topic before. To recap briefly, we discussed two factors that the Chicken Littles cite as “proof” of rising crime:

“Missing Data”

The crime statistics, they say, can’t be trusted because there are figures missing. In a sense, it’s true that there are data missing. Because there always are, every year — the FBI does not receive 100 percent reporting from the various law enforcement agencies around the county. But since this happens every year, it’s absurd to say that its occurrence in one particular year is a suspicious anomaly that indicates surging crime.

In another sense, there are never missing data. Because the statisticians don’t just leave gaping holes; they extrapolate to give the best estimates of the crime rate for jurisdictions that do not report. Unlike the MAGA politicians and pundits, they actually know what they are doing.

“Unreported Crime”

See above.

But there is a third factor that we did not examine previously:

“Reclassification of Crime”

This one actually might possibly have some potential possible merit to it, kind of sort of maybe. But not much.

“Reclassification” does not mean that a homicide gets re-labeled as jaywalking, and the cops have to dispose of the corpse to hide the evidence and balance the books. Generally it means that crimes get reclassified in terms of how they are tried and penalized; it also means in some cases that a felony is downgraded to a misdemeanor. But it’s still the same crime. And here’s the thing: “reclassification” doesn’t necessarily mean a more lenient set of guidelines, nor a reduction in official crime stats. Quite often it means just the opposite of both.

Let’s take a look at California. It’s an excellent choice for scrutiny because not only is it the most populous state, it’s also the state that the MAGA Cult most often tries to beat up on when shoveling up the bullshit about rising crime, “blue city crime” and “progressive prosecutors and mayors”.

In 2014, California downgraded certain offenses from felony to misdemeanor, causing critics to sound the alarm that without the deterrence of stiffer penalties, crime would zoom upward. Well, as it happened, some crimes in the Golden State did rise during the few years after 2014; but others declined, and overall crime rates later began dropping again — all of this with the same reclassifications still in effect. Furthermore, even if you assume that the changes in the laws were indeed a factor in that short-term surge, that’s a totally different matter from claiming that because of those changes, the official crime figures were inaccurate. The former is plausible enough; the latter simply makes no sense.

California also reclassified the crime of rape, with initiatives in 2016, 2021 and 2024. That reclassification resulted in a broadening of the legal definition of rape to include a greater number of offenses. In other words, it represents a stricter enforcement — just the opposite of what you’re always hearing.

And with a broadened definition of rape, you’d expect a significant increase in the official number of rapes, ne c’est pas?

Well, it didn’t happen. Quite the contrary.

Despite a temporary spike during the pandemic, the rate of sexual assaults in California declined by an impressive 26 percent between 2019 and 2024. They even declined in 2023, a year in which other violent crimes experienced an uptick in the state. In short, “reclassification” is by no means a smoking gun, as it were, in either contributing to crime or impugning crime statistics.

All three of these specious grounds for claiming there’s a criminal boom are examples of a fallacy that we can call the potentiality equals certainty fallacy — the belief that “could” is tantamount to “must”. Whenever there is even the slightest reason to suspect that a proposition might have even the tiniest bit of truth to it under certain circumstances, some people conclude that it absolutely must be true, period. Scientists sometimes are dishonest, so that proves that science can never be trusted, and climate change is a hoax. It’s theoretically possible for someone to cast a fraudulent ballot, so that proves that millions of voters did so in 2020, and Biden didn’t really win. It’s possible that there really was a historical personage named, or resembling, Jesus, so that proves that everything in the Bible is literally true. It’s possible to have snow in Florida — it has happened on occasion — so that proves it must be snowing there right now, and the meteorologists are lying to us.

The experts tell you that crime is sinking. The punditocracy and kakistocracy tell you it’s exploding. Who you gonna believe? Bear in mind that the latter have a reason for wanting you to believe the latter. They want you to distrust the experts so you will be more suggestible to their propaganda. At the same time, they want to manipulate you with fear so you will bow down more willingly to authoritarian maneuvers. Then the next thing you know, they’ll be “keeping you safe” by arresting innocent people, including U.S. citizens, and shipping them off to countries where they’ve never been before.