It's important to note that despite what Vox and similar publications say, when people say they want more cops 99/100 times what they really mean is they want to FEEL safer.

How safe you feel is less a function of local crime and more a function of local economics and media.

We've created this idea that more cops = feeling safer but we're arresting people at breakneck speeds, policing has gone up almost 4 fold as a percentage of the workforce in since the 60's, and people still say they don't feel safe walking home.

This is a hard topic to discuss with actual people on the ground because they will tell you that the system has gone soft because someone called in a crime and the person was immediately back out on the streets, but the reality is we've been locking up people longer than ever:

Every single year Gallup measures whether people believe violent crime has decreased and despite NCVS data showing conclusively it's been downward over time at the end of the tunnel 40-<60% of Americans each year still feel like it's increasing.

Now if you're wondering why, there's a lot of evidence back when I was in school having to read the peer reviewed articles that how safe you feel is a function of mainly three direct issues:

The first is obvious, were you a victim of crime that disrupted your life, and if so how serious was it? That one is pretty reasonable and self explanatory.

The other 2 are where the gap comes from.

Safety as a group was seen fluctuating dependent on how many younger POC (especially black and hispanic) they see outside. This was most pronounced with white and asian Americans, but for intragroup perceptions this was observed as well

The third was local news intake. The more local news people watch/read the less safe people tended to feel. This is how a white person in a white enclave can be virtually untouched by crime, not see a single POC in any given day, and still freak the fuck out about it.

So if you have a parent who's freaking out about crime constantly, see if you can get them to be less racist and/or (more likely to work) tell them to just stop watching nightly news and stop following local news feeds on facebook.

btw, this is part of the evil brilliance of Stop and Frisk as a policy. The goal was never ACTUALLY to lower crime, the real cynical smoke filled room goal was to have white people see black people getting frisked regularly and FEEL safer.