Stop gaslighting people about crime
Yes, crime statistics show long-term decline, but the numbers don't tell the whole story.
This week on the podcast, James and I took a trip to Skegness, and experienced for ourselves how the history of a place is very much driven by the history of its infrastructure… for good and bad. Check it out here or on your favourite podcast app.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Concern about rising crime is misguided. People are misled by sensationalist media coverage, viral Facebook posts, and cynical politicians. In fact, crime has been falling for decades now, and we can see the same pattern in most advanced economies - it has literally never been safer. We don’t have a crime problem; we have, in effect, a PR problem. If only we could educate the public better, their concerns about crime would go away. People who believe otherwise are - and this is a genuine phrase promoted by academics at the University of Leeds - ‘crime drop deniers’.
This is partly true, but entirely wrong.
I’ll deal with the facts in a moment, but let’s start with the premise that people are wrong, stupid or misled, and deal with the first and most obvious reason why statements like ‘but crime is decreasing’ are both misguided and infuriating:
As a citizen, I don’t care.
It is completely irrelevant to me that crime numbers are much lower now than they were in 1990, when I was 8-years-old. If I took my new car back to the dealer because the engine failed, and their response was “well actually sir, engine failures have fallen every year since 1993 and are close to a historic low,” my response would not be, “Oh of course, silly me! I should be grateful to live in such a wonderful age!” This is a completely insane approach to customer satisfaction: people’s right to complain about a problem is not somehow abrogated by the fact that it used to be worse in the past. Should I also be grateful that I can travel from London to Watford without having my stagecoach routed by Highwaymen?
Setting that aside, let’s get into the facts, and more importantly how the facts relate to the experience of crime, something which I think is *cough* criminally overlooked in this debate.
The statistics seem clear, and were conveniently summarised by the same Leeds academics last year: while 78% of people in England and Wales believe crime has increased in recent years, numbers from the Crime Survey for England and Wales - generally agreed to be the best data we have - show steep declines across the board, with violence, burglary and car crime down by nearly 90% in thirty years.
We see variants of this trend across most advanced nations and there are many proposed explanations which are hard to tease apart: cars and houses that are harder to break into, new housing estates with better layouts and lighting, overt mass surveillance, social media pressure, people staying at home more, even cultural changes as societies become less tolerant of violence in general.
But these causes have other consequences. In the year 2000 if a thief stole my wallet and legged it, I’d understand the police struggling to do much about it and chalk it up to the idiot tax. In 2025 if my phone is stolen I can track it via GPS and literally follow it from address to address, yet if I provide this gift of omniscience to the police they do absolutely nothing with it. This is even more galling because for most people having a phone stolen is a lot more distressing than losing a wallet - that little rectangle contains an entire digital life, and to have it in a stranger's hands feels like a profound kind of violation.
So yes, the raw numbers have gone down, but our experience of both the crime itself and the police response to it is far worse in a way that the raw numbers are poor at reflecting.
Meanwhile, our relationship with the police has profoundly changed. Weirdly, their presence has become both more distant and more intrusive at the same time. Local ‘bobbies on the beat’ were replaced by invisible agents in distant offices poring over women’s period tracking data, reviewing our social media feeds, or spying on us through CCTV. Roads bristle with cameras, car parks are monitored ANPR systems, algorithms comb through our bank accounts, all there to catch us out if we put a foot wrong.
The result of this colossal apparatus is that we live at a time when you can be banned from driving for going 4mph over the speed limit, but if someone steals your car and you provide the live GPS location of it to the police, the chances are they may not bother to investigate. A woman can be raped in a bathroom and see her attacker walk free, but if she tweets the wrong opinions she can get a heavy-handed visit from the authorities.
What you personally feel about these specific issues is irrelevant: my point is that the public have a deep-rooted sense of fair play and proportionality and this violates it on every level. When you combine that with the increased distance, you have a toxic combination almost designed to erode trust. Policing in this country is by consent, through an implied contract with the public, but that contract has been altered. I suspect it’s why phrases like ‘two-tier Kier’ are so resonant on social media - while a tad unfair to Starmer personally, they tap in to a frustration that’s been growing for decades now: a suspicion, reasonable or otherwise, that the police go for ‘soft’ targets because tackling ‘real crime’ is too hard.
But what even is crime? This is where the statistics start to break down, because there are different measurements - and therefore definitions - of crime.
Official figures, derived from the Crime Survey, may well be accurate but they’re incomplete because they focus on crimes against civilian victims. If a couple of teenagers get off their faces on drugs and set fire to the local playground, there’s a good chance that won’t be counted. Typically, as in my own village, those kids will be responsible for a big portion of crime and antisocial behaviour in the area, everybody will know exactly who they are, the authorities will do little if anything about them or the complex problems of their families, and the highly visible and frustrating problems they cause won’t be captured in this official data. Some of it will be reported to the police, who have seen reported crime rising in recent years even as their ability to solve it has declined. Much of it won’t be, because the police are regarded as a waste of time.
Drug use is another example. As a supposedly ‘victimless’ crime it also isn’t recorded in the Crime Survey, yet literally anyone with eyes can see that e.g cocaine use has sky-rocketed in recent years, and getting hold of it is as easy now as buying a takeaway. Cocaine deaths are now ten times higher than they were a decade ago, and deaths from drug-poisoning are at the highest they’ve been since records began in 1993. With that has come a steep increase in drug-driving, adding to a growing plague of people who seem unfit to be on the road.
All of this is incredibly visible to people in an age of Ring doorbells and social media. At times this can make people a little too suspicious, with local Facebook groups regularly hosting grainy doorbell footage of ‘a suspicious man walking near my house’; But it also means then when a gang of car thieves walked up our street with a handheld antenna to try to steal cars, they were picked up in high definition on multiple cameras. The police will have known who they were, but did nothing, and that’s somehow worse than if a thief just made off with a car in the middle of the night. The idea that even when the police can see the crime happening they’re still powerless to deal with it is deeply unsettling for people; London’s marauding shoplifters operating in broad daylight being another prime example.
There’s a cast iron law that everyone should follow, in all walks of life. If you have numbers that say one thing but users who say something else, then of course you shouldn’t ignore your numbers, but you definitely shouldn’t ignore your users. They are almost certainly telling you something important, something that your statistics - which are always an imperfect measurement of a messy world - aren’t capturing.
When academics write that “governments should be taking a more rational approach to crime that is based on evidence, not public perception,” it’s hard to imagine a more incurious, tone-deaf position they could take. When the public say they feel that crime is increasing, it’s not because they’re too dumb to understand the difference between The Bill and real life; they’re telling you about real things that they experience, the intense frustrations these cause, and a sense that the authorities don’t really care. Maybe crime numbers are down, but a feeling of lawlessness has grown and been allowed to fester, and preventing that is literally the second duty of any government after ‘don’t get invaded’.
Part of the problem here is our modern cult of measurement. When organisations decide to measure things, they tend to develop an unhealthy fixation on those numbers that overrides thought. We see this across government, the media, and the police themselves: politicians and journalists obsess over abstract numbers that are easy to report on, play neatly into the ‘horse race’ narrative of politics, but don’t directly measure people’s lives: is GDP up or down 0.1% this month? Is immigration at 250k or 350k? Is a particular measure of crime up or down 10% year-on-year? What does it all mean to Rachel Reeves? It’s all too easy and trite.
It’s not that these numbers aren’t important, but in obsessing over them and ‘what they mean for the next election’ we collectively lose sight of the national user experience - the way that the average person experiences Britain and how its governed. Yes, numbers are useful, but you also need to get out and talk to people, to understand where they’re coming from. If you continue to insist that they deny the evidence of their lying eyes, well you have only yourself to blame when people vote for more extreme options at the polls.
I’ll leave the last word to John Oxley, whose post inspired this piece:
Quite.
You can follow me on BlueSky or very stealthily in your car.
Another reminder to check out the podcast, in which I get incredibly frustrated by misuse of the term ‘staycation’ among other less important topics. Joking aside, we’ve been incredibly surprised by the reaction to this - the need for a more positive vision of the future seems to have really struck a chord with thousands of listeners.
Very interesting and well written piece. Some extra information could be helpful. In 2010 we had a competent professional police force and effective prosecution and courts. This has been fundamentally crippled over 15 years. Your article could have used this information to support your conclusions.
"Crime is down, but Morrisons have locked away booze" is a hell of a paradox