I typed a whole comment touching on this and was like "why bother?" because telling people they shouldn't be as scared as they are (not that I said that, but it was one takeaway) is a great way to piss them off. People cling to fear, no matter how gentle you are about it.

But yeah, a takeaway is: remember this next time there is a panic over crime! There are ebbs and flows all the time and rarely are they a sign of long term trends, especially in the negative direction. It's always bad when it goes up, but not a per se reason to be alarmed. And it's usually drastically overreported.....if murders go up 20%, coverage is gonna go up approximately one billion %