Local and national perceptions of crime rates have been shown to affect individuals’ policy preferences, behaviors, and sense of community cohesion. Following a spike in homicides in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, violent crime has become a salient political issue across the United States and fear-mongering messages of a “crimewave” from political figures have made a deep impression on the American public. One of the most widely documented methods of combating misinformation is inoculation theory, which argues that a message which (i) communicates to readers that their attitudes will be threatened and (ii) preemptively refutes the tactics of misleading messages can “vaccinate” respondents against misinformation. Misinformation about crime has yet to receive adequate attention in the inoculation literature, and crime rates provide a novel case of “therapeutic” inoculation, where individuals’ attitudes are corrected prior to being “vaccinated”. This paper details a cross-sectional online survey experiment (n = 3,154) designed to test the effect of inoculation and simple refutational messages on individuals’ perceptions of crime rates, personal fear of crime, and support for criminal justice reforms in the face of a fear-mongering message. Both the inoculation and simple refutational messages significantly decreased misinformation among participants and provided protection against the effect of the fear-mongering message on perceived likelihood of victimization. However, the messages had little to no effect on influencing policy preferences among respondents, and the inoculation and corrective messages were virtually indistinguishable in their outcomes despite inducing different levels of counterarguing and threat in readers. Future research could use a longitudinal study design to examine whether it takes additional time for individuals to incorporate the correct information on violent crime rates into their policy preferences.