Free Myths vs. Reality guide and early episodes: https://darknessdisguised.com/jury-room/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=show-notes&utm_campaign=launch&utm_content=ep1 Did Robbery Disappear? Robbery is down, way down. If you only read the headlines, you'd think we're safer than we've been in fifty years, and in one very narrow sense, we are. But I wanna ask you something, and I want you to actually sit with it for a second. What if robbery didn't just disappear? What if some of it moved somewhere our numbers don't look? Today, we're gonna look at what the numbers say, what they were built to count, and what they leave out so you can decide for yourself, and whether "Is crime going down?" is even the right question. Every case begins with a headline, but it doesn't end there. Behind every charge is a story. Behind every statistic is a life. And behind every verdict is a system that shaped the outcome. I'm Dr. Amy Poland, and this is Darkness Disguised, a podcast dedicated to shining light on what justice leaves in the dark. [00:01:00] Together, we'll explore the hidden layers of crime, the psychology, the power dynamics, the forgotten voices, and the uncomfortable questions. Because understanding the darkness is the first step towards meaningful justice. A few years ago, I was standing in front of a room of students, walking them through exactly this kind of data. Robbery, taking something from another person through force or the threat of force, had fallen by about three-quarters since the early 1990s. A real documented decline. And I remember feeling almost proud of it, like we were watching a policy success story play out in real time. That same week, I read about a local woman who had lost her savings. She wasn't robbed at gunpoint. Nobody broke into her house. She got a phone call from someone claiming to be her bank: Calm, professional, [00:02:00] patient. By the time she hung up, four thousand dollars was gone. No mask, no weapon, and nothing that would ever show up in the statistics I'd shown my class two days earlier. And I remember thinking, "Is this the same crime just wearing a different coat?" That's today's question. Let's take it apart. Start with what we know. Police-reported robbery peaked in 1991 at about 273 for every 100,000 people. By 2019, it had fallen about 70 percent to 82. It kept falling. The FBI's most recent national report shows robbery dropped another 8.9 percent in 2024. And this isn't just police paperwork. The National Crime Victimization Survey asks people directly whether they've been [00:03:00] victims, and whether or not they called the police. It shows the same long decline. When two very different measurements agree, that's worth taking seriously. Fewer people are being held up on the street. That's real, and it matters. The question is what that number does and doesn't tell us. The FBI began its Uniform Crime Reports in 1930, tracking seven core offenses: homicide, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, theft, and motor vehicle theft. Arson was added in 1979. The victimization survey launched in 1973, and it leaves out murder, crimes against businesses, and anyone under 12. Those categories have barely changed, and that's partly on purpose. Keeping the same definitions lets us compare one decade to the next. There have been updates, like [00:04:00] better survey questions and a broader federal definition of rape. But the lens was built for a world where theft needed a body and a room. To be fair, the FBI's newer system, NIBRS, does now track identity theft and computer hacking. But when you hear the crime rate on the news, those usually aren't part of it. Most online fraud gets reported somewhere else entirely: the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center in its own separate report. In 2025, that center logged just over a million complaints, with reported losses of nearly 21 billion dollars. That's up 26 percent from the year before. Americans over 60 reported about 7.7 billion of it. Now, here's the caution I give my students. Those are complaints people chose to file, not a crime rate. [00:05:00] Some of that growth reflects more of our lives moving online and more people knowing where to report. So lining it up percentage for percentage against robbery would be misleading. But another number points the other way. When the victimization survey asked about identity theft in 2021, about 24 million people, roughly 9 percent of everyone 16 and older, said it had happened to them that year. Only about 7 percent of them reported it to police. Researchers call that gap the "dark figure" of crime. Online, that dark figure may be enormous. That woman's loss is still real, still hers to carry, but because it happened through a screen instead of at gunpoint, it gets filed somewhere else, counted differently or not meaningfully counted at all, and it [00:06:00] almost never comes up when the news announces whether crime went up or down. So did robbery move online? Here are the two main answers you'll hear. One: displacement. Robbery is a crime of proximity. You need a person, a place, a weapon, a getaway. It's risky, it's visible, and honestly, it's inefficient. Why choose that when you can reach into someone's account with a keyboard instead of a gun? Two: these are separate stories. Criminologists Graham Farrell and Daniel Birks tested whether cybercrime caused the crime drop and concluded it couldn't have. Robbery started falling in the early 1990s before most households were even online. They point instead to better security, things like cars that are harder to steal, and homes that are harder to break into. In their view, the drop in street crime and the rise of online crime are two [00:07:00] separate trends. Both can be true at once. Online fraud may not explain why street robbery fell, and it can still be a huge growing harm that our headline numbers barely see. And if you heard one of these explanations and immediately believed it, ask yourself why that one. So did robbery disappear? Street robbery really did fall, and that means fewer people facing a gun. But "crime is down" often means "the crimes we've always counted are down". Whether total harm is down is a harder question. So here are a few to take with you. When someone cites a crime statistic, what is it counting and what isn't it? Who is most affected by the crimes in the separate report, and do they show up in the headline? And if we keep measuring crime the way we did in [00:08:00] 1930, what will we miss in 2030? The next time someone tells you crime is disappearing, ask them where it went. It might not have disappeared. It might have just found a quieter way in. The stories we cover here aren't simple, and neither is justice. Before I let you go, I wanna tell you about something I've been building. Every episode, there's more than I can fit: the sources, the legal details, the questions that keep me up after the mic goes off. So I'm opening the Jury Room, a membership for listeners who wanna go deeper. For $5 a month, you'll hear every episode early and get a monthly case file with the research behind the story. For 10, you'll also get a monthly bonus episode, a live session with me, a vote on what we investigate next, and chapters from my crime novel series, Poker Faces, as I write them. And founding jurors get first chance at something I've never offered before: naming a [00:09:00] character in my next book. Founding prices are locked in for life, but only until December 31st. The link is in the show notes. I'd love to see you inside. If today's episode stayed with you, sit with that. Talk about it, question it, share it, because the more we're willing to look at what's uncomfortable, the closer we get to something better. This is Darkness Disguised, shining light on what justice leaves in the dark. I'm Dr. Amy Poland. Until next time, don't look away.
