By their fruits shall ye know them. I grew up in the fifties: my parents didn't lock the car, didn't lock the house doors during the day (but did overnight), let us wander freely all day in fields, woods and beach with only the instruction to be back for tea. Sounds idyllic. Actually, it felt idyllic too. The only thing I did to deserve the disapprobation of the bobby led to his having a word with my father and my bending over the car bonnet for the vigorous application of a leather carpet slipper. It isn't sentimental to talk in these terms: that's how it was for me and my friends.
It must be a slow news day North of the border, as they round up the usual suspects to fill those column inches...
http://news.scotsman.com/scitech...fm?
id=450942005
In response to your opening paragraph, surely one's opinion on whether crime is better or worse depends on one's point of view. Maybe we should talk about the impact of crime rather than crime itself.
Tom,
Thanks - I probably would have missed that.
Graybo,
Yes, you are right - it's subjective. If I was burgled last week, my personal crime rate has gone up 100%
Bystander, that's only true if you were half-burgled the previous week :-)
According to Home Office figures, homicide has doubled since the 1950's. Are we really supposed to believe that the police didn't notice half the murders that took place then? Or that they did notice but ignored them?
And everybody agrees that gun crime has risen dramatically and is more of a problem now than ever. That, after all, is the rationale behind the passing of ever more draconian firearms laws.
And if homicides and gun crimes have risen since then, and everybody believes from their own experience that there is more crime around generally, why should we not accept that the general perception is true?
Also, when you say that illegal drug use has gone up, I doubt few would disagree. But from context, it appears that you think that this is not "real" crime, that it somehow shouldn't count. Similarly for drink and cars; you seem to be saying that if you can find a reason why crime should have gone up, then that is the same as saying that it hasn't.
When I've encountered similar arguments, in the press and personal conversations, they are invariably being made by people who don't want tougher laws (except against things they personally don't like, like target shooting and fox hunting), and are especially frightened by the idea of people being allowed to defend themselves against violent criminals, the suggestion being that people don't need such a right because the threat doesn't really exist. Are you sure that you are not yourself starting out with a conclusion ("the law enforcement system works") and working backwards to deduce the evidence ("crime can't have gone up")?
Alex,
Everyone likes to think that things are getting worse. That crime is rising is assumed, without thought, to be true. Thanks to the Daily Mail, we are groomed to think that we live in "lawless Britain".
The British Crime Survey offers an antidote to this. They survey a lot (30,000 or so) people, and ask them: have you been the victim of a crime in the last 12 months? If so, what kind? Now obviously, this doesn't pick up drug *use* (as there is no victim, except perhaps the user, who is also the villain of the piece), but it does pick up drug related robberies, etc.
What the BCS found was that - since 1995, violent crime has almost halved!
So much for lawless Britain.
Cheers,
Robert
There are certain types of crime that have all but disappeared. For example, the "wages heist". Wages used to be paid in cash, in an actual wage packet, and this was the motive, I believe, for The Great Train Robbery. Gangsters used to hold up factories and offices shortly before pay day.
Poisonings are all but unknown now, but it was a common murder method 100 years ago.
I used to work in The National Archive and had access to some of the murder records. It was much more common for very young babies to be smothered and passed off as a stillbirth, up until they introduced the welfare state. Victorian London was a very dangerous place. I don't think the prevalence of crime actually changes very much, just the various methods.
There are plenty of statistics on crime - HO produces annual crime figures for this century. At www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs/100years.xls you have figures since 1898. Of course you can poo poo (!) these figures but they are an indication of the trend. (Methods of collecting the figures changed in 98/99). In 1898 there were 4221 instances of violent crime, in 1998 there were 352873....
Regarding the British Crime Survey - dont forget that it is compiled by interviewing 40000 in their homes and then exprapolated to the whole country. In addition the Survey is hardly comprehensive when it misses out murder, sexual offences, crimes against people under 16, illegal drug use, and crimes against commercial premises, including thefts of trucks, vans and shoplifting.
An example is here. http://www.civitas.org.uk/data/c...ures2002-
03.php
Forgot to include fraud in that list as well....
I wonder about poisoning (does Shipman count?). A friend of mine who became a doctor told me how to poison someone (a random someone, not anyone in particular) with easily available materials in a way that if done with sufficient care would be virtually identical to a heart attack and very difficult to differentiate at post-mortem even if you were suspicious and knew what to look for.
The old days of ladling the arsenic into the porridge have gone, that's for sure, but I would be surprised if the ancient art has gone into the abeyance suggested by the figures.
Another odd figure is that LSD use has almost entirely vanished, which must be some sort of first. I've seen this accounted for by a number of factors - LSD production is difficult and the precursors are very effectively controlled, other drugs are much more fashionable, the police got very good at chasing the supply chains, etc - but it seems to be true across many countries and not as a result of any particular change of policy. It's an interesting anomaly - as is the recent change in status of psilocybin mushrooms, which I predict will give Bystander some knotty cases to chew on in the future and make sure the drug crime numbers remain unhealthily healthy.
R
I grew up in the 50s and 60s in west london, compared to today there was less crime, the populkation had not yet been forced to chai everything down, sure I allways padlocked by bike(except once and then the police returned it), through my parents business I met both sides of the law (it was an unofficial tea room for Acton police) and witnessed many "interesting" conversations between the officers and local villans, still you could leave your car without a fancy alarm, outside east acton tube and it would be there on your return, this all started to change in the 70s along with the colonisation of the vale flats by the 2nd generation carrabian folks, then if you had a Ford 1600E securicore could not save it. I was on good terms with these citizens, due to being the nearest small bodyshop and they not being too good at drugs and driving, our cars and premises were never touched, unlike those arround us. In the 50s and 60s the villians were a little ethical, by and large they would avoin the man in the street and small businesses and aim for bigger fish, this code is well gone now the theives will take anything from anyone. The real evil is probably no worse (moors murders etc) but people are a lot less honest and because of the police perscuition of motorists they have alienated a lot of the driving population (speed cameras are now called cash machines)
Imho the answer is to get police on the streets instead of criminals, persue genuine safety issues with driving, bring back hard labour, the death penalty (how much money did we waste on Hindley?) and make 10 years mean at least 8 if real good
I think also a lot of people are being told that 'making a judgement' is wrong and so they are calling the police whenever possible, whereas previously they would not have done - such as when there's a fight outside of a pub.
I blame society for consistently penalising people for acting on their own recognizance instead of forwarding everything to 'the relevant authority.'
" The only thing of which I am sure is that nobody knows how much crime there is, or how much crime there was in the old days. If anyone tells you that they do know, you know that you are listening to nonsense."
No, that is nonsense. You know yourself that you can make comparisons based on your own life's experience. I submit that a person who has experienced 50 adult years probably has quite a good idea of whether crime is worse or better. And the homicide figures just don't lie, corpses are pretty tough to explain away.
I agree with many of the detailed points that you make, but the real question is whether people in their own lives experience more crime than they did before. I believe that they do, because their testimonies uniformly say that they do. When ALL the witnesses say something is true, aren't we supposed to believe it? We send people to prison based on that sort of evidence, don't we?
Part of it is that crime has reached farther up the class scale than ever before. Crime has always afflicted the less successful. Now the more successful live less physically separate lives, and the criminals are more mobile. Those of us who might not have experienced crime 30 years ago now do, or know sociially those who have.
I know that my own world is less orderly (and feels less safe) than it was 30 years ago.
I think Wambaugh was right- our new therapeutic faith has removed all the old NOs, without replacing them with new ones. We are living in the fruit of that outlook.
Just as a sidebar - I noticed a couple of people commenting on drugs crime numbers going up. Believe it or not, that's actually a good thing. And no, I'm not smoking anything.
Over 90% of drugs crimes (and by that I mean the entry on the computer system with a crime number, just like in the case of a burglary), are generated by police activity, be it an investigation or a lucky stop-check, or whatever. So if the number of recorded drugs crimes goes up, it is, in a funny way, a good thing, as it means we're doing our jobs better and catching more of the buggers. Something to bear in mind the next time a load of statistics comes out and the press starts up with the 'lawless Britain' schtick.
Staghounds: you're forgetting the fact that people's memories don't actually work as well as they think. In every society since the ancient Greeks (probably earlier ones as well), older generations have bemoaned the 'fact' that everything has got worse since their young days.
This doesn't make it true... it's just that when old, you're more likely to be scared of crime; when you're young, you're more likely to do it - and you forget you're not the same person you were 10 or 20 or 40 years ago.
Alex:
I was commenting on the statistics, no more. I deplore crime, and when appropriate I punish it. All that I am saying is that the available figures cannot be read in isolation from social and economic changes, so they fit Churchill's immortal definition of statistics, that they are like a lamp post that can either light the way or serve for a drunken man to lean on.
I'm with Winston on this one.
So Crime is going down, eh? Everything is rosy and any reported increase in crime is just so much inaccurate perception by blindly panicking people?
Take a look at this link to the Sunday Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/
opini...requestid=27721
As someone who has wide experience of how the Police and courts deal with the law abiding in the subject of firearms, I'm tempted to say that a VERY double standard is operating here ... but that is just my "feeling" and warped perception...
I took a look at Phil's link : -
"Criminals turning up in hospital with gunshot wounds were often reluctant to involve the police, which led officers to treat the incidents as "no crimes", Mr Coles said."
Hardly a new thing there, this happened with knives, razors and indeed a few gunshot wounds in the early 60s to my knowledge.
Among other crimes of the early 60s that you don't see now are police-run protection rackets for clubs in Soho and police facilitating big theft-rings at the big markets and the docks.
Oh, and "the homicide figures just don't lie, corpses are pretty tough to explain away"
That's true. It's very much more true today than it was 50 years ago.
"So Crime is going down, eh? Everything is rosy and any reported increase in crime is just so much inaccurate perception by blindly panicking people?"
That's not what Bystander said, and either you know it and just want to stir, or you haven't read the blog properly. Some violent crimes are being counted now that have undoubtedly always existed in similar numbers but were rarely recorded - domestic violence, for one, and if you've read David Copperfield's blog you'll know how repeatedly-arguing couples can rack up the statistics.
The child murder rate hasn't changed in decades, especially attacks by strangers, though the tabloids have you believe otherwise. If you discounted schoolkids nicking mobiles off each other, the robbery rate would probably plummet. Not everything in the garden is rosy but I don't believe it's as bad as the doomsayers have it.
And I speak as a recent victim of crime.
Are you sure that you are not yourself starting out with a conclusion ("the law enforcement system works") and working backwards to deduce the evidence ("crime can't have gone up")?
You can't measure the effectiveness of the criminal justice system that way, because you don't have a control group. The system might work wonderfully and crime still go up, but at a much slower rate than if there were no police or no courts, or it might go down even when the system isn't working. Since the effectiveness of the criminal justice system isn't the only variable effecting the level of crime, you can't measure it by looking at crime statistics.
How to measure it? That's a tough one.
Some selective arguing seems to be going on here.
For example, you can select figures to “show” that violent crime has or has not gone up or down in recent years. But, as I said, the homicide rate has doubled over the past fifty years. Does anybody believe that this is not substantially true? Show of hands please. If not, please explain why not.
And if the homicide rate is rising, are we then supposed to believe that other forms of violent crime have not also risen? Home Office figures say that violent crime has risen five-fold since the 1950’s (that’s FIVE TIMES). Is this really all just pub brawls and domestic arguments? And sorry, Bystander, but you really do seem to me to be sliding your argument from “It’s understandable that crime has risen” to “Crime hasn’t really risen at all”. And it also seems to me that to say “Well, I don’t want to believe what you say about life fifty years ago, so your memory must be faulty” doesn’t, to say the least, constitute rational argument (especially since my parents were around then, and their memories are just fine, thank you).
And, if violent crime is not rising, why are the police, the civil service, and the vast majority of politic
Go for it. Make that sentence yours.
So what part of the 'The loss of deference...' point implies 'everything is okay'?
A historian writes:
bystander is spot on here.
As for the argument that you can't hide bodies, another historian, Dr Howard Taylor, late of Cambridge University, has argued that in the C19th, the murder rate was kept artificially low by police and coroners, because the Treasury only had a certain budget to prosecute homicides.
Personally, I don't buy Taylor's arguments, but there are some interesting reports from the Registrar General around 1900, saying things like - 'We had 1,500 hangings last year. ALL of them were accident or suicide. Is that likely?'
Crime stats are a good way of finding out what the criminal justice system is getting up to. They are lousy for measuring crime.
PS - as it happens, I favour wider legal handgun ownership. But it'll cost us.
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