Crime was down again in the year to September 2010.
Recorded crime shows falls across the board, with the exception of sexual offences which are up slightly. As ever, changes in recorded crime can be affected by changes in definitions, by the way the police do the recording or by the willingness of victims to come forward, but there are no major shift in any of those which would lead us to think it isn’t a real change. (In some previous years there have been quite significant changes, some of which have made crime look higher than it really was).
The British Crime Survey [pdf] – which asks a large sample of people the same questions every year about their own personal experiences of crime – can be a better guide to the trends, and that too shows a small but significant drop in crime from 2009 to 2010. The BCS found household crime to be up 16%, but otherwise crime is down.
So good news all round.
But we still don’t really know why.
Clearly good policing makes a difference. A lot of crime is committed by a small number of prolific criminals, and stopping them has a big effect on the figures. Local authorities also work closely with the police and, when it’s done well, help the police focus on the issues local people really care about.
Our prison population in the UK is higher than ever, so some argue that crime is down because more criminals are behind bars.
But the challenge – to explain why levels of crime right across the western world rose through the 1980s, peaked in the early to mid 1990s and have been falling since – has not yet been met. In the UK crime rose sharply under Thatcher’s government (which didn’t tend towards an overly liberal approach to criminals). It peaked in 1995, fell sharply from then until the late ’90s and more gently since.
It doesn’t seem to correlate to economic cycles, prison populations, police investment or any other obvious factor.
Steven D Levitt famously argued in Freakonomics that abortion laws should take the credit – that following changes in the law many of the people who would have gone on to be criminals were aborted. That theory doesn’t seem to stand up to close scrutiny either.
Any fall in crime is good news and, despite what we might think from reading certain newspapers, we’re all much safer today than we were in 1995. The way the police are more willing to focus on the issues that really matter to people – anti-social behaviour in particular – even if they aren’t quite the “proper crimes” the coppers might prefer to be dealing with – is an excellent development (and, to plug my own neck of the woods, one the police in Stockport have been taking up for some time).
So we should welcome the good news and continue to work to reduce crime and the fear of crime, but perhaps we need a little circumspection when it comes to making grand pronouncements about exactly why we are where we are now, or what will lead to the positive trend continuing in future years.
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7 Comments
It is worth looking at specific crimes and see the trends there. Car crime might be down because car security is much better. Mobile phone theft depends on whether the popular mobiles are cheap – in which case why steal them?
Television coverage and better education on security are all factors.
The Spirit Level shows that unequal societies have a higher level of crime. Crime increased substantially under the Tories when inequality widened dramatically. Under Labour inequality increased at a much slower rate.
Geoffrey – there’s certainly good evidence for the sort of links you talk about for some specific crimes. For example, upvc windows and doors in houses probably do a lot more to reduce burglary rates than fancy alarms. Better anti-theft devices in cars probably reduce the number of car crimes but may also increase car-jacking.
I don’t know about television coverage, though there is a strong correlation between your fear of crime and the newspaper you read.
I also don’t know whether the evidence in the Spirit Level on crime and inequality stands up to scrutiny. The biggest falls in crime in the UK were 1995 to 1999 – when the Conservatives were in power, or at the start of Labour’s first term (before any changes Labour made had a chance to feed through the system). I’m not aware of a big turnaround in UK inequality levels in the mid ’90s, nor that such a change was replicated in the US and elsewhere but I haven’t looked.
Rather than abortion laws can we attribute lower crime to the fewer unwanted pregnancies resulting from increased condom use during the period of AIDS awareness in the late 80 and early 90s?
This could rescue the essence of the Freakonomics thesis from the flaws in previous evidence that you refer to.
@Iain Roberts Could you point me to where that statistic comes from about fear of crime correlating to newspaper readership?
Serves me right for mentioning a study I remember but don’t have to hand. This paper provides evidence for it http://bjc.oxfordjournals.org/content/33/1/33.abstract but isn’t the study I’m thinking of – can’t track that one down at the moment, but it was some research that came out last year.
Joe – interesting theory. Off the top of my head, I don’t think increased condom use among heterosexual couples reduced the birth rate much as other forms of contraception (pill, coil, cap) were widely used, but could be worth a look.
What do the long term trends look like – since 1945, say? That might give a much more meaningful indication of the importance of economic trends.