Lets be clear here. There are three main ways you can measure crime. The first - the overall number of crimes reported to the police - is the least reliable, since it includes the most potential for bias, misreporting or underreporting. The second is murder statistics - which is more reliable than overall crime reported to the police since, as anyone who's seen The Wire knows, you can report a felony assault as a misdemeanor disorderly conduct, but how can you make a body disappear?
You can't, which is why, paradoxically, murder statistics are a more reliable proxy for overall crime than overall crime statistics.
But there's a third way to measure crime: survey data. Take a sample of a few thousand people, and ask them how many times they - or their immediate families - have been victimized by crime in the last month. Survey data is subject to a lot less bias than overall police crime data, and because it asks about overall crime, rather than focusing only on murder, it's arguably more reliable than murder statistics as a proxy for overall crime. (Though opinions differ on this score.)
The thing, in Venezuela, is that there is a gap between the second and third indicators. While murders have been rising fast in the last decade, self-reported victimization in surveys hasn't been going up nearly as fast. Meanwhile, the perception of insecurity has been tracking the murder curve...which is well ahead of the self-reported victimization curve.
Which is all a way of expressing that, while certainly impolitic and arguably incomplete, Gabriela Ramírez's speech wasn't quite as entirely off-the-deep-end as some of the more excitable commentary would have you believe. It genuinely is true that people feel more and more unsafe, and that that feeling is growing at a speed that can't be accounted for by the rise in the number of times they or their families become victims of crime.
[Note: all the data this post is based on comes from Latinobarómetro, which is behind a subscription firewall, so no - no links.]
Post 26 of 100. Steady as she goes.