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Comment by paulpauper | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, footage of crime goes viral, but this also creates perception that crime is worse than it really is. given 200 million Americans with a smart phone and social media accounts, there will always be crime somewhere being recorded. This does not mean the perps in those videos do not get caught later even if they appear in the video to have gotten away.

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The media has always greatly amplified perception of crime.

In the 80s and 90s for instance daytime TV convinced parents that pedophile abductors were stealing kids everywhere when in reality these crimes were and are statistically extremely rare.

Depends on whether the story is dramatic enough to report it. Video of small-time property crimes that would have otherwise been ignored by the media are now getting attention. If someone stole a package from a porch in the 90s, nobody would have covered it. Now, if you have a dramatic doorbell video, it'll get attention.

That's my point. Everyone and their dog has a ring doorbell now. Property crime was definitely worse in the 80s and 90s, but you'd only hear about it through the grapevine.

> Everyone and their dog has a ring doorbell now

You might be living in a bubble.

You might be incapable of recognizing hyperbole. I am saying that home security cameras are popular. They are, and videos from them are regularly shared in local news stories and on social media.

Stats I’m seeing put it north of a quarter of households with video doorbells, and rising. Not literally everyone, but a whole lot. I’d say more than half the houses in my middle-class suburban non-tech-hub-city neighborhood have one, and this isn’t some early-adopter gadget nerd crowd.

(for the record, we don’t have one)

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