The survey question is “Is crime up”? and leads to lots of wrong answers, in part because even well-informed people aware of trends don’t have dates firmly lodged in their heads.
The Washington Post has run a poll and congratulates itself on making its readers much more aware of the drop in violent crime from 2022 to 2023:
Go Biden!
But Washington Post readers are much more clueless than the average American about the huge rise in violent crime in the 2020s:
An embarrassing 11% of Post readers were aware that violent crime was worse in Biden’s 2023 than in Trump’s 2019. This is even despite an ongoing crime wave in DC.
And, of course, calling 2019’s lower crime rate “pre-pandemic” rather than “pre-George Floyd” is tendentious.
