The Crime Conundrum

If you have a spare twenty minutes or so might I suggest you have a listen to the Crime Conundrum available on IPlayer Radio at the link below.

Prior to 1993 crime in the UK was rising, on average, about 5% per year for about fifty years. In 1993 it peaked at 19 million crime incidents. Then, quite unexpectedly, crime fell; not just by a little, but by a lot! In fact it has halved in the past two decades. The other remarkable thing about this is that nobody was predicting it.

Crime used to be associated with economic recessions, but in the great recession of 2008 crime continued to fall. Crime was important politically as well. Remember Tony Blair saying “Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” and Michael Howard saying “Prison works”. Today, except for the growth of online offences, crime barely gets a mention by politicians or in election manifestos.

Can the fall in crime be attributed to the criminal justice system, policing or government policies? Most experts seem to suggest not.

This BBC program examines what might be the causes of this enormous fall in crime and as you will hear: nothing is certain

Here are some of the possible causes mentioned in the program:

• DNA profiling increases certainty of prosecution and conviction and so deters criminals
• Designing out crime from products (phones), vehicles and homes makes it very much more difficult to commit crime. E.g. Theft of vehicles has fallen from 620 thousand per year in the mid 1990s to 85 thousand in the last year
• Crime levels are directly related to inflation and the price of goods/stolen goods. Typically stolen goods are now considerably cheaper to buy than they used to be and so the value of the stolen item is so little that the effort to steal them is not matched by the reward
• The population is ageing. Older people commit considerably less crime than young people and a greater number of older people in a population are possibly civilising the young.
• Alcohol and drug use by young people (often associated with crime) has been declining since the beginning of this century
• Change in forms of masculinity (male social norms) mean that being tough is no longer cool and so there is less violent crime
• Compared to Victorian times and in the early decades of the last century the general public do not walk around armed to the teeth to defend themselves, which would have contributed to violent crime.
• Lead in petrol causes brain dysfunction and affects the decision making part of the brain. Does the removal of lead in petrol mean that younger people (who commit more crime) are better able to make the decision not to commit crime? – not all people agree.

See if you can make you own mind up. It was good to see ‘Designing out crime’ in the list of probably causes for the reduction; something I spent a great deal of my police career promoting.

The Crime Conundrum http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0415hbs