“I have to wonder … Is crime really going down,…”

I believe the drop is real, for one good reason –

The saturation of video cameras in public, and private. So many people have Ring cameras and similar, and are more than happy to hand over the video to cops if they ask for it.

It’s nearly impossible to get away with crime scot-free in such an environment. You leave ‘Digital Footprints’ *everywhere* as you move about…

Probably both. You have to keep in mind why it went up recently (2020 craziness, along with criminal justice and bail “reform”). Of course they want to hide anything that makes them look bad to the unaware normies.

No one,

I would guess that most of us have a similar “gut feel” to yours about where any “reduction” in crime is really coming from, but if that is what is happening, it becomes almost unprovable.

That would result in the official statistics looking better, while the reality gets worse.