> Meanwhile murders, which are the one violent crime whose statistics are extremely hard to game or underreport, on account of dead bodies being attention getting, are still way up from the post crack war lows.

But... that's not true?

1900-2001: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Homicide_rates1900-2...

1991-2022: https://www.statista.com/chart/31062/us-homicide-rate/

We're at one of the lowest historical rates since the early 1960s.

You're the one who brought up the "crack wars" narrative; the article doesn't mention crack at all.

It does, however, state (contrary to your claim) that murders are _down_ (by 34%). If you are taking a narrower view of "still" and only counting the Covid era spike (generally agreed to be due to people being forced to spend more time in small, socially isolated groups) I would note that 1) this still has nothing to do with crack and 2) it would be an example of exactly the sort of cherry picking you claim to object to.

Personally I'm more interested in how things are trending more recently, so the high starting points of these graphs in the 90's aren't really what I care about. But even selecting graph midpoints to roughly estimate the last 15 years instead of 30, there are clear downward trends.

To me the more important point is that the majority of people surveyed each year feel like crime increases every year, whether or not it actually does. It's a good example of the biases at play with public perception.