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Excellent point and that's exactly what the Pew study showed:I wonder how much of the decrease is a result of people simply not reporting things? I know when I lived in Arizona, there were so many instances of little things that most people I knew didn't even bother calling the police about vandalism and theft. Cops were hostile to people calling them for anything less than a shooting or stabbing.
Most crimes are not reported to police, and most reported crimes are not solved. In its annual survey, BJS asks victims of crime whether they reported that crime to police. In 2017, only 45% of violent crimes tracked by BJS were reported to police. And in the much more common category of property crime, only about a third (36%) were reported. There are a variety of reasons crime might not be reported, including a feeling that police "would not or could not do anything to help" or that the crime is "a personal issue or too trivial to report," according to BJS.