Britain not safe from crimes against perception

ANOTHER week, another round of searing crime stories, each one more damaging than the last to whatever hapless government seems to be in power.

A man kicked to death by thugs in Warrington, a convicted killer on the run from an open prison near Dundee, Grampian police arresting tiny four- and five-year-old felons for offences ranging from vandalism to shoplifting – yup, the world is going to hell in a handcart. The kids are out of control, their parents don't give a damn, society is falling apart.

This is, in other words, the conventional wisdom of our age; one of the core beliefs about the society we live in that underpins millions of personal decisions each day, that shapes our media agenda, and that increasingly drives government policy. The only problem, though, is that there is little or no evidence that any of it is true.

Yesterday, the latest British Crime Survey statistics – based not only on police figures, but on surveys of the actual experience of crime in the general population – revealed that the chance of becoming a victim of crime in Britain today is at a 27-year low, with violent attacks in England and Wales down 8 per cent, and robberies down 17 per cent. There are one or two areas of real concern: drug-related crime has risen by more than 20 per cent, and gun crime has nudged upwards very slightly.

But overall, so far as any sober statistician can discern, the image of Britain as a nation in the grip of an unprecedented wave of crime, and particularly youth crime, is simply a lie; as is the idea that our criminal justice system – easily the most punitive and overcrowded in Europe – is some kind of soft touch. Yet it is a lie that is almost universally believed; and the latest Scottish Social Attitudes survey confirms the same yawning gap between perception and reality.

So why, given the apparent facts, has this false set of beliefs about our society become so pervasive? Above all, I think, because there are some particularly powerful forces in our society that, consciously or unconsciously, have a great deal to gain from promoting the fear-of-crime agenda, and from exploiting the time-honoured tendency of every ageing human population in history to feel that the world is going to the dogs. There are opposition politicians, who naturally wish to argue that the current government, whoever they are, are presiding over a situation of chaos and crisis. There is the whole huge panoply of commercial interests – from car manufacturers and security firms to internet dating services and the purveyors of home entertainment systems – who rake in the profits from our growing fear and dislike of each other, and our increasing retreat from convivial public space.

And then, above all, there is the media: poor helpless victims of their own need to make money in an ever-more-competitive world, and of the fact that sensational stories about crime have always represented one of the surest ways of selling newspapers, or attracting viewers. The other night, for example, I caught a rare glimpse of the once-mighty Six O'Clock News on the BBC, and found myself first amazed and then enraged by the miserable catalogue of cheap, dumbed-down sensationalism – including a lovingly-detailed report on Amy Winehouse's alleged crack cocaine habit, and no fewer than three local crime stories artificially promoted to national status – that poor George Alagiah was obliged to present to the viewing public.

What is happening, in other words, is that in pursuit of stories which people will find interesting or exciting, once-trusted media organisations have gradually adopted a commercially effective but socially disastrous code of values that frightens their readers and viewers half out of their wits, implicitly distorts the statistical prevalence of crime, traduces the society in which we all live, and incites cruel levels of mistrust towards a younger generation who – as David Cameron once briefly dared to suggest – often seem more in need of a hug than of harsh punitive treatment. If we had a government worth the name, it would of course understand the forces behind this destructive culture of exaggeration and sensation, and challenge it at every turn.

But, instead, our current apology for a Labour government runs scared of the media agenda, panders to the false fears parroted back by the public, and constantly feeds the social atmosphere of paranoia and moral panic that itself, in the long term, encourages criminal attitudes. To fight crime and the fear of crime, in other words, a society needs a progressive image of what it could be in the future, rather than a series of reactionary myths about what it once was in the past. And when a government loses the power to provide that kind of vision, it should perhaps recognise that it's time to go; before any more harm is done, and before our exaggerated fears of a society in freefall begin to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.