They're watching the same newscasts and true-crime documentaries that are leading to perceptions of nonexistent "crime waves" with all the pathologies that come along.

Also don't forget the inflation of the term "sex trafficking" which has been twisted to apply to things that most people would not ordinarily apply it to, so that police departments can look better in the news. They bust a prostitution ring, and every prostitute gets counted as a "sex-trafficking victim" so they can spin it as this great liberation of people. Reading the headlines it sounds like Taken, but the reality is much less black and white.

Doesn't help that every few months a certain political party screams about a 'caravan' of migrants coming to the borders with the sole purpose of causing crime.

I think it's mostly an artifact of 1980s and 1990s daytime TV hyping every single missing child and making a generation of parents think this was happening everywhere all the time.