Freebase Dali

Yep, violence has definitely gone down a lot since past times.
Strangely, America's perception of violence has countered the actual statistics.
Well, not strangely... look at this media we have.

It's no wonder that a lot of Americans feel less safe now than they did not 20 years ago, and crime statistics have actually fallen since then. We don't even need to hint at the probability that most people's perception of the safety status of the outside world is largely dictated by mainstream media. Nor do we need to really debate the tendency of people to not actually factor in the population at large and compare the occurrences to come up with a set of odds relevant to their life.
Instead, we end up with people that experience a constant sensationalist media sputum of almost glorified violence because it gets ratings. The crime drops, yet their fear of crime rises.
Unfortunately, we won't ever hear the mainstream media telling us we're safer than we were a decade or two ago. That might cause people to feel like their lives are ok, and maybe they can stop trawling the news daily so they can figure out how they're likely to die the next time they walk out of their house...