i understand if you've got personal experience (hard to beat) but if you refuse to measure the world around you won't make sense of it and will end up guided by your feelings.
My point is that it's impossible to be objective with a wickedly complicated metric such as "crime rate". Are you familiar with p-hacking? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_dredging
It is dogmatic to throw out all studies because they may have data dredging. It is prudent to carefully consider studies individually and look for any flaws in their methodology.
Furthermore, it's impossible to give proper weight to the impact of the actions of a few white collar criminals(think Ben Bernanke). e.g. How many died because of the 2008 crash?
I completely agree, but the data sets for what we're talking about here depend on corrupt judicial systems reporting data accurately. Then you have to consider what's legal and illegal
yes, p-hacking is an issue (esp with big data). The issue comes from fishing through all relations looking for statistically significant ones regardless of any potential causal basis.