Labels can be useful identifiers – until they are not. Shifts in the American evangelical movement suggest that the label is increasingly papering over a growing split on faith and identity.  

When Patrik Jonsson proposed the story below, it began a two-week discussion among Monitor staff about how to cover the resurgent threads of white supremacy in the United States. The take-away: This kind of journalism is uncomfortable and difficult but is necessary and can be enlightening if done with honest reasoning.

How do you measure an economic recovery? Ten years on from the Great Recession, we find it means different things for different people. 

In Guatemala, changes in laws and policies can help address an astonishing rate of child marriage. But the more-needed change, many activists say, is of mind-set. 

The news about coral reefs is almost universally dismal. But many scientists are offering a more nuanced story that speaks both of nature's remarkable resilience and the challenges of surviving a changing world.   

A good deal of daily news reporting points to what’s going wrong in society. That’s needed if solutions are to be found.

But bad news – often amplified by social media sharing – can have a distorting effect on thinking. People take more notice, and may remember more vividly, news that describes in detail a threat, such as a crime, act of terrorism, or disaster. News that reports on what’s going well, or getting better, may not register with the same emotional punch.

For decades the rate of violent crime in the United States has been headed down. Yet polls show that most Americans still haven’t caught on to that good news.

In 2017, for example, New York City is poised to experience its lowest level of violent crime since the 1950s. In 1990 the city experienced 2,245 killings. With 2017 nearly over, this year’s total is 286 – the lowest number for which reliable records can be found.

Data from the 30 largest US cities shows that the annual murder rate in 2017 will decline 5.6 percent from 2016, reports the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law. Among the cities with the largest decreases: Chicago (down 11.9 percent) and Detroit (down 9.8 percent).

“Once again crime rates remain near historic lows. This is welcome news as 2017 comes to an end...,” said Ames Grawert, counsel at the Brennan Center.

In an analysis last spring, the center found that across the US crime has been decreasing for the past quarter century, from 5,856 crimes per 100,000 Americans in 1991 to an estimated 2,857 per 100,000 in 2016. Murders alone have fallen from 9.8 per 100,000 in 1991 to about half that, an estimated 5.3 per 100,000 in 2016.

What’s causing this encouraging trend is less clear. A strong economy that supplies good jobs is a likely candidate, but it doesn’t explain everything. An in-depth look at the drop in violent crime in Los Angeles by The Wall Street Journal found that the lower crime rates in high-crime neighborhoods happened despite rising joblessness, high poverty, and shrinking household incomes in those areas.

The solution may lie in part with a program that recruits former gang members to work with youths and head off crimes before they happen.

The drop in crime rates isn’t spread evenly across the US. Smaller cities such as Charlotte, N.C., and Baltimore have seen substantial increases, resisting the trend.

Each city needs to find its own formula for success. Many have found that community policing – officers assigned to a neighborhood who get to know the residents and their challenges – is effective, building mutual trust between police and residents. 

Washington, D.C., once referred to as the nation’s murder capital, has seen a dramatic drop in crime in recent years.

“It really is about having a community that is engaged with the police department. I mean, really engaged,” Cathy Lanier, former police chief of Washington, D.C., told the Post. “They trust you, they trust the cop on the beat.” 

Spreading the good news that crime is diminishing can calm fears and replace them with brighter hopes for the future.