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 %

Property crime has soared. And the sad truth is the murder statistic is strongly influenced by VCU hospital, shootings went up, just fewer of them died

The city isn't particularly dangerous, but if we ignore the fact that crime stats are getting worse it could go that way