If I ask if they've had anything stolen, the answer is always no; then they justify that result because they always lock things up!
Maybe that's actually part of it. A culture of suspicion would seem likely to make crime less likely to be successful, so perhaps worried vigilance is part of why crime is decreasing.
Edit:
Underreporting might explain some of this apparent decrease, too. If you think there's essentially no hope of recovering what was lost, you might well not bother reporting a crime, and you're less likely to think that the police can be effective for you if it seems as though they're ineffective in general.
Last spring, I had my G1 stolen right out of my hands while I was texting on it, in downtown DC. I didn't even realize it was taken at first; I thought I'd dropped it because someone bumped me, so it took a few seconds to even look for the thief, and by that point he was just going around the corner. If I had reported it, I wouldn't have been able to give a description other than general skin color, build, and clothing, and 90% of the people around me were wearing the same jeans-and-red-shirt as the thief (a Capitals game night). With less than a 1% chance of getting my phone back, and no insurance on it, I didn't bother to spend the next coupla hours of my life complaining to the police about it; that would have just made things worse for me.
I assume you can just flash it to a new serial number, but I don't know that much about it. The T-Mobile folks didn't seem surprised when I said it had been stolen, and had a procedure to cut off the sim pronto, so it's not too unusual.
Maybe he was a secret agent on a mission and he needed to call the CIA RIGHT NOW to report some amazing world-saving discovery! By giving up his phone, he could have been SAVING THE WORLD!
Maybe that's actually part of it. A culture of suspicion would seem likely to make crime less likely to be successful, so perhaps worried vigilance is part of why crime is decreasing.
Edit: Underreporting might explain some of this apparent decrease, too. If you think there's essentially no hope of recovering what was lost, you might well not bother reporting a crime, and you're less likely to think that the police can be effective for you if it seems as though they're ineffective in general.
Last spring, I had my G1 stolen right out of my hands while I was texting on it, in downtown DC. I didn't even realize it was taken at first; I thought I'd dropped it because someone bumped me, so it took a few seconds to even look for the thief, and by that point he was just going around the corner. If I had reported it, I wouldn't have been able to give a description other than general skin color, build, and clothing, and 90% of the people around me were wearing the same jeans-and-red-shirt as the thief (a Capitals game night). With less than a 1% chance of getting my phone back, and no insurance on it, I didn't bother to spend the next coupla hours of my life complaining to the police about it; that would have just made things worse for me.