Per capita IS the normal measure- always has been. It means if you live in a neighborhood of similar density as you did in the 70’s, say, all 1/3 acre lots, there are fewer crimes in that neighborhood than there were before. Yes, the population is growning. There are more neighborhoods. Brilliant of you to notice. But for every 100,000 people in a city or town, fewer of them are robbed today than in the 70’s. Not to mention the OP statement of these crimes apparently not occurring- you may have left your doors unlocked, and there may have been fewer humans around, but each one of those humans had a greater chance of a crime being committed against them. Odds of a crime happening to any individual are simply reduced today. But stick with you math as you like. Just avoid a career in statistics or probability.
I dunno about anyone else here but I was only speaking of the decline of trust by people who used to leave a cigar box out with the produce, some change and a few bucks plus a note saying Please Try to Make Your Own Change. Not so much about general crime rates.
Regardless of stats on crime -- and I live in an area where there's not usually much of it (although that might be because there aren't any deputy sheriffs handy so no one's sure who's packing a subsitute for a 911 call)-- I don't see many of those cigar box, make-your-own change, casual approaches to making sales to a presumably honest customer base. It's just not done any more, I guess.
About the closest I can summon up there is that our local general store (which is no longer in business, although over thrashed profit margins, not thievery by customers) used to extend credit to all customers a month at a time until such time as they proved unworthy of it via not settling up for cash or good plastic within 10 days of the new month.
They didn't have a cigar box on the counter to make your own change though. And there was a sign in the window that noted if you shoplifted you'd get a free ride from the sheriff to the slam.
I always figured the proprietor had a weapon back behind the deli counter in case someone decided to take a whole ham on credit without properly introducing himself first. But, there were never any such incidents that I was aware of for at least the last 25 or so years of that store's existence.
Still he didn't trust us to make our own change in that last quarter-century of trade, as had earlier been the case in that store (which opened in the mid
19th century) and up in New England when I was in school in the 1960s.
And so I mark it as a decline in something attitudinal in the USA, something about both trust and honesty, and a sad thing a decline in either one of those is, too.
