Crime As Proxy For Disorder

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 about muttering to themselves, and people walking around with giant boom boxes 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:

You can listen to Crime As Proxy For Disorder online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

Crime As Proxy For Disorder is an episode from Astral Codex Ten Podcast by Jeremiah Prophet.

This episode is 17:05 long.

This episode was published on Mar 14, 2026.

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