Dykman felt that a spread on crime would be one effective way to dispel some common public misunderstandings. He considered three possible approaches:

1. Rates . Dykman had worked with crime statistics for several years at the Washington Post , and he had long been fascinated by what he considered Americans’ irrational fear of random crime. “Random crime is virtually nonexistent in this country,” he says, yet it was feared out of proportion to its frequency. A graphic could make that rarity vivid.

2. Prisons . The US also imprisoned more people per capita than any other country. ^[15] Perhaps he could chart which prisons held how many prisoners, or compare the number of US prisoners with those of other countries.

3. Location . Dykman might also explore the changing trends in where crime occurred. He knew that small and medium-sized cities were experiencing large increases in crime rates. ^[16] Dykman muses:

Per capita, you have a 40-50 percent higher chance of being murdered in Columbus [Ohio] than New York. Yet which do we think of as the pure American heartland? You’re wildly safer in the South Bronx than you are in Columbus… That’s just the truth of this data… [And] there is a way to empirically present… the truth about crime.