I think what’s unintentionally eye-opening about this chart is the recency of “law enforcement can read your text communications.”

Law enforcement doesn’t need this surveillance ability at all. All time periods prior to 25 years ago didn’t have it.

Additionally, there is no correlation between “law enforcement reads text messages” and crime rates going down.

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jackp96 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Not trying to defend our national dystopian nightmare of a surveillance state — but I'm pretty sure this is wrong?

Crime's been decreasing for years, and (from what I understand) this year is tracking to be one of the safest years on record?

Definitionally, there absolutely has to be a correlation (not causation) between those two factors you listed.

https://ourworldindata.org/us-crime-rates

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edoceo 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Didn't freakenomocs claim it (crime rate) was (primarilary) about abortion in the 1970s and less unwanted (and unsupervised/undisciplined) children growing up?

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	▲	Grombobulous 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		There’s also the leaded gasoline theory.

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Grombobulous 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

These charts make the exact point I was making.

Most of the crime decrease from its peak happened before the year 2000.

That means back in the days of law enforcement needing to do low-tech wiretapping techniques, crime was still rapidly decreasing.

There’s just not even a correlation. And, as a reminder, correlation is not causation even if it was there.