Chapter 1: What is the main problem regarding crime perception?
Welcome to the Astral Codex X podcast for the 19th of February, 2026. Title, Crime as Proxy 4 Disorder.
This is an audio version of Astral Codex X, Scott Alexander's Substack. If you like it, you can subscribe at astralcodex10.substack.com.
The problem? People hate crime and think it's going up. But actually, crime barely affects most people and is historically low. So what's going on? In our discussion yesterday, many commenters proposed that the discussion about crime was really about disorder.
Disorder takes many forms, but its symptoms include litter, graffiti, shoplifting, tent cities, weird homeless people wandering around muttering to themselves, and people wandering around with giant boomboxes shamelessly playing music at 200 decibels on a main street where people are trying to engage in normal activities.
When people complain about these things, they risk getting called a racist or a Karen. But when they complain about crime, there's still a 50-50 chance that listeners will let them finish the sentence without accusing them of racism. Might everyone be doing this? And might this explain why people act like crime is rampant and increasing, even when it's rare and going down?
This seems plausible, but it depends on a claim that disorder is increasing, which is surprisingly hard to prove. Going through the symptoms in order. Litter, roadside litter, for example on highways, decreased 80% since records began in 1969, but it's unclear if this extends to urban environments.
New York City has a litter inspection and rating system that's been in place since 1973, and they also report improvement, quote, from roughly 70% acceptably clean in the 1970s to over 90% clean now, end quote, although citizens protest that the system doesn't match their experience.
National surveys find that the percent of people who admit to littering has gone down from 50% in 1969 to 15% today. None of these are knock-down evidence on their own, but taken together and added to the overall crime trends, the evidence for a secular trend downwards is convincing.
The more recent numbers are all confounded by the pandemic, and I have no confidence in the direction of the trend since 2010. Graffiti. There are no good data for graffiti. Most of the discussion focuses on New York, where everyone agrees the long-term trend is down since 1970.
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Chapter 2: How do disorder and crime relate to each other?
Here's a graph shoplifting in the United States from 1960 to 2020. It shows a peak around 1990. It had been climbing steadily since 1960, then it decreased and reached its local minimum in the early 2000s, and it's climbed slightly since. Scott writes, even if we worry about the increase over the 2005 low, it seems to be only about 33% over 15 years, which should be hard to notice. Strange.
The FBI runs a different shoplifting reporting program, NIBRS. This does show a large increase since 2018, but is considered less reliable because new cities keep joining and so year-to-year reports aren't comparable. Maybe the problem is limited to a few big cities. What about San Francisco in particular? Here's a graph, shoplifting in San Francisco versus national average, from 1960 to 2023.
It shows a peak around 1990 and a steady decrease since. Scott writes, "...at least in these data, it's, if anything, less." Okay, so could stores be failing to report to police?
Some stores say they're doing this, and there was an embarrassing incident, it might be the 2021 spike on the graph above, where two stores briefly changed their reporting policy and nearly doubled the total report number. We need an equivalent of the NCVS, reports coming from the victims themselves.
Our best bet is the National Retail Survey, from a retail organisation which asks stores what percent of their inventory they believe they lose to various causes, including shoplifting. Here's a graph, estimated external theft or shoplifting portion of shrink as percentage of sales.
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Chapter 3: What symptoms of disorder are discussed in the episode?
External theft has historically been around 33% to 36% of total shrink. This chart multiplies total shrink by the reported external theft share. It goes from 2004 to 2022. It's showing a modest increase. It starts at around 0.5% and it increases up to about 0.57%. Scott writes, only about a 20% increase during the 2004 to 2022 period.
The NRS is sponsored by a retail trade industry group which really wants to find shoplifting so they can lobby for better anti-shoplifting measures. In 2024, they were so embarrassed by their failure to do so that they stopped the survey entirely and sold the survey brand to an anti-shoplifting security tech company. No bias there.
The company replaced it with a survey of vibes among store owners and dutifully reported that the vibes about shoplifting had never been worse and you needed to buy their product right away. Now what? The survey doesn't disaggregate by city, so maybe national shoplifting is stable, but San Francisco really is worse and just isn't reporting it to the police?
Might this be because there are fewer stores, everyone is buying through Amazon, and therefore even if all existing stores are crammed with shoplifters all the time, it shows up as less shoplifting? This isn't trivially true. The number of stores has declined less than I would expect, maybe not at all. But there's been a shift in types of stores, from big box to local.
If these types have different shoplifting or reporting patterns, that might matter. Otherwise, we're in the awkward position where everyone, including stores, reports higher shoplifting numbers, but two datasets both disagree. Homelessness and tent encampments. Here's a graph of homelessness, courtesy of Claude. So the graph shows the time period from around 1950 to around 2020...
It shows historical estimates before 2007, and then it shows the HUD point-in-time count from 2007 to 2024. You may have to check this out in the post, but it does look like it's plausibly high compared to the 1980s and 1990s. Plausibly, it's at around the same level because the uncertainty is high. It's captioned, I've confirmed the post-2009 trend.
I haven't fully double-checked the others, but they match my impressions. Audio note, there is a big spike since 2020. It was trending down and then it spiked back up again. Scott writes, this looks like a similar pattern to crime, although here the likely explanation for the COVID bump is the pandemic-associated rise in house prices.
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Chapter 4: How has littering changed over the years?
Good measures of tent encampments over long periods are hard to find. San Francisco has this one. Here's a graph. Number of tents and structures used by homeless people reaches new low. So it goes from 2020 to 2025, and we see that in terms of total tents there was a big spike in the early 2020s, and it's currently at all-time lows. Various points in time are marked.
We have the Shelter loophole injunction lifted. That leads to a sharper downward trend. Grants Pass, SCOTUS, says it's legal to clear encampments. It continues to trend down. And New Mare, London Breed, to Daniel Lurie, continues to trend down. And the same pattern seems to apply for sites with over six tents or structures.
Scott writes, but it starts in 2019, peaks during the pandemic, and then declines. This can't really show whether 2019 was already higher than some previous year. Here, LinkinPost is an interesting graph of Seattle's homeless sweeps, that is the number of times the police acted against encampments. Here's a graph, sweeps of unhoused people in Seattle 2008 to 2023.
After a pause during COVID, encampment removals have surged to record levels. So we see a graph that has surges between around 2014 to 2020, fairly large surge in 2020, very few during the 2020 to 2022 period, and then a larger surge than any before from 2022 to 2024. Scott writes, but it doesn't tell us whether encampments are increasing or the police are taking them more seriously.
It does rule out a story where encampments are increasing because the police are no longer taking action. Aside from the pandemic, police are taking more action than ever, at least as measured here. People with loud boomboxes in public places. All I have to say about this one is that it's terrible and I hate it. Overall, it's surprisingly hard to find data confirming that disorder has increased.
Littering seems to be down. Graffiti is unclear, probably varies by city. Shoplifting seems to be up 20% from generational lows, but still lower than the 1990s. Homelessness seems to be up 25% from generational lows and equal to the 1990s. And tent encampments are hard to measure nationally. In San Francisco, they are below pre-pandemic levels.
All of this is compatible with a story where disorder levels mostly track crime levels. rising from 1970 to 1990, declining from 1990 to 2020, and rising a little after 2020. Crime began falling again around 2023, but the evidence on disorder, while too spotty to say for sure, doesn't seem to include such a reversal. So here are three theories of perceived rise in disorder.
Theory one, these concerns stem from the small compared to secular trends bump in these problems around 2020. Since then, crime in tent cities have declined, but people still haven't updated because of a combination of lag time and maybe some other forms of disorder still increasing. This feels wrong to me.
People aren't comparing the present to the golden age of 2019, they're comparing it to the golden age of their parents' and grandparents' generation. So let's take a longer view. Theory 2. Modern disorder was effectively impossible before 1950. There was little litter. Cheap packaging and disposable bottles had not yet entered into common use. There was no graffiti.
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Chapter 5: What does the data say about graffiti trends?
But this happened at the same time as the 1960s race riots, and white people fled to the suburbs and didn't encounter the urban environments where these problems were worst. Around 2000, when the direction of white flight reversed and became gentrification, white people moved back to the cities, experienced the urban environment for the first time, and awareness of these problems rose.
This still doesn't quite cash out to a secular rise in squalor and disorder. Murder rates in 1900 were still higher than today, and although there was no plastic waste, the streets of turn-of-the-20th-century cities were, quote, Let's sharpen our focus. Theory 3. Here's a graph. Homicide rate and year-over-year percent change in homicide, 1900 to 2025.
It does indeed show a big dip between about 1935 and about 1974. It's captioned, data on property crimes is worse but suggestive of the same pattern. What caused this local minimum in crime?
Claude suggests a combination of low Depression-era birth rates, small cohort of adolescents in peak crime years, the wartime economy and post-war economic boom, high psychiatric institutionalisation rates, and, quote, cultural and social cohesion, end quote, in the wake of World War II. But none of these explain why the trend should start in 1933, nor reach then-record lows by 1939.
Nor does it explain why we should update so strongly on this unique period that we still feel cheated 60 years later when things aren't quite as good. Maybe this is just the way of things. The Romans were constantly complaining about their failure to equal golden ages centuries in the past.
Still, I find it helpful to remember that although things are worse than the best they've ever been, except murder, murder might actually be beating 1950s record lows, they're not so bad by the standard of average historical periods. Finally, theory four. The squalor and disorder of the past took different forms than the squalor and disorder of the present.
Horse feces and flies instead of litter and graffiti. People crowded ten to a tenement apartment instead of sharing the subway with a boombox guy. Tobacco smoke everywhere, including restaurants and fancy hotels, instead of marijuana smoke everywhere.
Crime that looked like picaresque stabbings in bordellos or gunfights at saloons by characters with names like Thomas Piper, the belfry butcher, and Sarah Jane Robinson, the poison fiend, rather than insert various descriptions that would get me cancelled for racism. We look for our current problems in the past and cannot find them, then romanticise the problems the past really had.
Many people complained that by talking about crime yesterday, I was distracting from the rise in disorder. Probably people will complain today that by talking about littering and graffiti and so on, I'm distracting from some other kind of disorder, which is definitely increasing. Maybe open-air drug markets or tent cities or the boomboxes. That's fine.
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