You can get a false sense of how common, dangerous, etc something is by the frequency of reports from a news outlet. What they are saying is true, but how relevant that is to the average person can be far from the truth.
A perfect example of this. I've seen here on HN people worried about crime on public transit (any crime, from murder to petty theft). Specifically citing the terrible crime problems of NY and CA transit. Yet when you actually look at the numbers, you see the crimes per day are closer to 1 or 2 while the travelers per day are in the millions. Meaning it's a literal 1 in a million event that you'll be the target of crime on public transit.
News outlets lie to you not by telling false stories but rather by weaving false narratives around the stories. "Crime is out of control" is the false narrative, but it's backed by real stories of crime, sometimes horrific.
I think you are missing a few things about crime in a big city. People don't want to be victims of crime. So when crime rises, people adapt their behavior to adjust for that. People will stop going out at night in certain neighborhoods for example. They also stop reporting certain types of crime, like property crime.
So when there is a multi-year trend in crime, it means that where and when the crimes are happening have to change multiple times to adapt to people's changing behaviors. And if you don't keep up on how that changes, your chance of getting robbed goes up quite a bit. This is why you don't tend to see crime yourself (unless there is mental illness involved), it tends to happen where there are fewer eyeballs.
I knew quite a few people who have been the victim of violent (and random) crime. Each time it happened where other's couldn't see it. But its nice that you lived in a part of town where you never had to learn this type of street knowledge. Not everyone is so lucky.
Transportation crime fear is compounded by another issue: "scary people." I've personally never witnessed a crime. But I've seen plenty of people that raised my hackles, usually they seem intoxicated or are exhibiting some kind behavior that may indicate mental illness. Are they going to get up and stab me? Probably not, but it sure seems like it could happen, and it sometimes (though rarely in terms of transite miles) does happen. I can intellectually dismiss other low prevalence issues in a way that it is hard to do with public transit, viscerally.
I know you meant "became wary" when you wrote "raised my hackles", but that phrase means "to (visibly) upset or arouse one's anger," which I'm sure is not what you meant. But it does speak to a large part of the problem: people becoming overly engaged with something that they should probably just acknowledge and be aware of, without changing their behavior significantly.
Crime hysteria seems like it gets people, who are unlikely to be victims of crimes but more likely to have outsize political influence, involved in law enforcement policy. Without being forced to dogfood the results of their own advocacy, you end up with policing rules written by people who rarely are forced to interact with police, and who are very scared of crime that never happens to them.
You can get a false sense of how common, dangerous, etc something is by the frequency of reports from a news outlet. What they are saying is true, but how relevant that is to the average person can be far from the truth.
A perfect example of this. I've seen here on HN people worried about crime on public transit (any crime, from murder to petty theft). Specifically citing the terrible crime problems of NY and CA transit. Yet when you actually look at the numbers, you see the crimes per day are closer to 1 or 2 while the travelers per day are in the millions. Meaning it's a literal 1 in a million event that you'll be the target of crime on public transit.
News outlets lie to you not by telling false stories but rather by weaving false narratives around the stories. "Crime is out of control" is the false narrative, but it's backed by real stories of crime, sometimes horrific.