Common sense tells us that crime is rising. Large majorities agreed that it was in Gallup polling last year, as well as in 23 out of 26 previous yearly surveys. But what seems to be an obvious fact is an illusion, a product of something psychologist Daniel Kahneman called “availability.”

The illusion collapses when we look at the facts about crime rates. Data collected by the FBI and by the Department of Justice reveal that crime has actually decreased dramatically over the three decades covered by those Gallup polls.

The FBI data are based on reports from police departments across the nation. The Justice Department’s come from surveys asking the public if they’ve personally been victimized by crime. Their estimates are higher than the FBI’s, because citizens don’t always report crimes to the police.

Both show, nevertheless and in almost lock-step, a dramatic fall in crime rates since 1993. Examples from FBI statistics include reductions of 49% for violent crime and 74% for robberies, as reported by the Pew Research Center on April 24, 2024, at pewresearch.org. The Justice Department’s surveys reveal even steeper declines. Murder rates spiked during and immediately after the Covid epidemic of 2020 but have since resumed their downward trend.

Steven Pinker, in his book, “The Better Angels of Our Nature,” demonstrates that this is part of a larger trend away from violence that’s been going on, with bumps along the way, since the beginning of civilization. We have far to go before we’re a crime-free society, but, compared to the historical record, we live in remarkably peaceful times.

We all rely – we must rely – on common sense in our daily lives. But it used to tell us that the earth stands still and the sun revolves around it, much as it insists today that crime is rising. Daniel Kahneman’s book, “Thinking Fast and Slow,” reveals why common sense fails us so often.

His book is the result of a career devoted to the study of how humans make decisions. He found that, most of the time, we judge the frequency of events like crime based on how easy it is to remember them, instead of an actual count. He called this “availability,” a strategy that, he said, “inevitably produces systematic errors.”

The availability strategy has served an important survival role throughout human evolution. We usually don’t have the time to investigate and analyze all the facts, and it burns up a lot of precious energy to do so. Availability is quick and effortless.

Dramatic news reports of assaults, robberies, and other crimes are more available to us than facts and statistics, which are harder to find, boring, and often difficult to understand. It’s no surprise that they have such power over us. We’re programmed, so speak, to overestimate the frequency of criminal acts.

Availability fuels President Trump’s campaign to justify sending troops to American communities. He couples the rising-crime myth with another one about lawlessness run amok in cities controlled by Democrats and their liberal policies.

Cities have higher crime rates than small towns and rural areas, and the larger the city is, the higher its crime rate is likely to be. Crime rates in fact grow faster than the population does, as demonstrated by Yu Chang and colleagues, in a paper published in the International Journal of Information and Decision Science (Volume 9, 2018). Most major cities are controlled by Democrats, so it’s easy to come under the impression that crime and the Democratic Party go together.

But a study by Justin De Benedictis Kessner and colleagues, published at science.org by the National Institutes of Health on Jan. 15, 2025, looked into the President’s claim by examining three decades of records. They found that, “Electing a Democrat rather than a Republican as mayor leads to no detectable impact on police staffing or expenditures on criminal justice, nor does it lead to changes in crime or arrest rates.” Sarah Steffen and Gianna Grun, with the German news service, DW, at dw.com on Sept. 3, reported essentially the same result regarding last year’s crime rates in the 100 largest cities in the U.S.

The President relies on availability, where stories and pictures triumph over facts and analysis, to promote these and other myths. This is the realm of electronic media like television, radio, and the internet, as opposed to printed sources, which are more compatible with rational thinking, and we’re increasingly vulnerable to it. The President is in this sense more the symptom than the illness.

The antidote is a renewed respect for facts, reason, the written word, and science - and a healthy skepticism toward common sense.

Lowell Harp is a retired school psychologist who served school districts in Ogle County. For previous columns, follow him on Facebook.