Misconceptions about crime rates can seriously affect the decisions of legislative bodies when enacting crime control policies. Without accurate figures and comparisons, they cannot make an informed judgement about which crimes occur most frequently, and where government dollars should be spent on specific crime prevention measures. The misconceptions of the public are also important because they affect how the legislators will spend those monies so that they can best satisfy their constituents' beliefs about crime.
It was reported in 1998 that crime has not changed much over the last 30 years, but the ways crime is detected, the information processed, and how it is dealt with have changed significantly, and often leads to public misconceptions (Part, 1998). There is a greater recognition of violence against women today, and there is gang violence, but the gang violence is not as widespread as most people believe. It is confined mostly to Los Angeles and Chicago. There has been a rise in lethal violence, and especially in assaults with weapons and homicides in which guns were involved.
Because of gang activity in some places, the juvenile crime rate is up in those areas, and violence against women and children is increasing, but this can also be explained in some areas by gang violence, e.g. accidental shootings (Part, 1998). There has been an increasing racial concentration of crimes, and the number of drug-related crimes has definitely increased. However the rates of property crime have remained stable, or even decreased, and the correlates of crime have been stable over time and location,
National policy debates in regard to crime have been dictated by a few high-profile researchers, and the media has played a role in focusing public attention on the results of these few researchers, and therefore often contributed to the public misconceptions of crime rates, for instance portraying juvenile crime as much wo...