For example, household burglary dropped 56% from 1994 to 2011. https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=4657
Theft and motor vehicle theft have had similar major drops (figures 10 and 11): https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/mpcncvs.pdf
This data is from the National Crime Victimization Survey, which directly asks respondents if they have been the victim of a crime, and is not based on police reports or prosecutions.
The same decline has also been seen in violent crime, and is actually one of the major unanswered questions in modern criminology: why has crime declined by about half since 1990? There are many theories (you've probably seen the theories involving lead or pollution exposure) but no definitive answers. But whatever the explanation may be, it does not justify brutal punishment, since (a) crime is declining, not increasing, and (b) I'm not aware of any substantial evidence showing a major deterrent effect of severe prison sentences or even capital punishment.
Yes, home burglaries are usually reported and tracked in data. But, as it says in this very New York Times article, package theft goes completely unreported and is therefore not part of your statistics. Likewise, sexual assaults in subways are only very recently being tracked in New York. Why did you choose, by the way, to assume I was only talking about property crime? The types of crimes not tracked by NYPD is vast, and such crime I have seen escalating year over year.
Stats are stats, but if you live in New York, you notice how 10 years ago people didn't rob Walgreens, and now they rob it all the time practically on an on-going basis. You just take what you need and walk past "security." See some boxes inside a vestibule? They're yours. But it's not just property crime, it's all crime.
You may be noticing these issues more, but that's because you're older and have seen more examples over the years, and perhaps have gotten more invested in your community -- not because they are universally more common across the country.
If you take the stats you cite as truth, I don't know how you square these stats with the contents of the original post itself.
As you know, stats represent a sample. Beyond the sample, there is reality.
I've lived pretty much my whole life in New York City (54 years) and it's safer and better than it's ever been.
Sure, there is crime. But things are so much better than they've been in my lifetime that your complaints ring really hollow to me.
I could recount countless episodes of violence, criminal activity and general bad behavior over the past 45 years or so (with the police certainly not excluded from those. Not by a long shot), but I won't bother. The statistics speak for themselves.
I've had my packages stolen a few times. And if the lazy, rapacious, scumbag managing agents for my apartment building cared to do their jobs, the person(s) (there are several known to me who almost certainly are responsible), would have been identified through the video cameras (I used to have access to them, but that was removed when the building was sold 8 years ago or so) and arrested. And that would be a strong deterrent.
Not sure where you live (although I'd be surprised if you actually lived in NYC given your seeming lack of knowledge about conditions here), but you're flat wrong and have provided exactly zero evidence to support your inaccurate pronouncements.
The solution is not more violence. I suspect the problem is that the police have failed at the basic business of connecting crime to punishment, so they roam neighbourhoods looking for people they deem suspicious and dishing out punishment. So you get injustice and crime.
It's a basic competence issue.
I haven't had packages stolen here, because if no one answers the doorbell, the delivery person will personally call you and ask if they can leave the packet with a neighbor.
Sometimes they call you before going on route and ask you if the delivery address is ok or if you would like it to be delivered to an alternate address (like your office/neighbour).
I think the problem is you have people who grow up in violence and only know violence. If we have a society that successfully educated people, kept people from falling through the cracks and provided them with opportunities, violence wouldn't be necessary. But for how many generations has our society failed people? How many generations have the failed, neglected people in our society grown up only knowing violence as something to be respected? Two? Three? Four generations? The question in my mind is whether even violence will deter people, which I am not certain of. But certainly prison doesn't deter anybody.
The only real answer, obviously, is education. But education is almost beyond repair at this time.
If you want a solution to the spiral of violence, http://www.svru.co.uk/ were hugely effective as an intervention carrot-and-stick approach.
Just because that was the most vocal faction doesn't mean they are the only faction, or even the majority.
If you look at society 400-500 years ago, brutal punishment of this variety was the norm: theft in Restoration England was often enough met with hanging. Since then, the penalties for theft and other "petty" crimes have been reduced, to the point that now theft has been completely normalized. People complained, for example, when charges against Amy Cooper were dropped in New York, but the fact is that you can get arrested hundreds of times in New York, and your charges will always be dropped, for basically any charge, theft, assault, domestic violence, you name it, they drop it. There is a total unwillingness by people in power to inflict punishment on people who punish ordinary citizens by committing crimes against them, sending the signal committing crime is not at all, in fact, criminal, but normal, expected and acceptable behavior. Non-criminal people will flee such environments en masse or become criminals themselves. The result will be lawless cities that blowhards like Trump talk about but do nothing to fix, and only make worse.
I am not saying we should go back to hanging people for theft. But we do need to figure out how to punish people without maintaining the Prison Industrial Complex. We need to figure out what is a crime (theft) and not a crime (drug use), we need to provide social services, food, shelter to poor people. We MUST provide education and opportunities to people. But if crime goes unpunished, perhaps in an asymmetric manner like caning, the lawlessness we're seeing today will grow much, much worse and make basic life unlivable in places that were once and still maybe are the pinnacles of civilization, like New York. It will destroy us.