Statistics say one thing, our gut feelings another. So are we winning the fight against crime, or is crime simply adapting to the changing contours of the modern world?

Things can only get different

Tony Blair first looked like Prime Minister material on the day he pledged to be tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime. In that one scintillating soundbite he synthesised conservative and liberal ideas of crime and reconciled apparently conflicting beliefs that crime is either the consequence of weak character or of social exclusion. As a summation of the emerging philosophy of New Labour, the line was inspired; as a recipe for dealing with crime, it was virtually meaningless.

For a start, no one can really agree on the causes of crime, and certainly not on their relative significance. Second, while punishment and deterrence clearly work for some people, for others they don't. (60 per cent of prisoners reoffend within two years and research shows the worst offenders already think sentences are longer than they really are. It doesn't put them off.) Crime is a subject on which everyone has views, most of which are based on anecdote, intuition and received wisdom. It is also a subject on which few people can offer any useful facts.

The result is that most of the debate about crime is sterile, dull and stuffed with hoary old statistics. Every so often someone will come up with a new idea – zero tolerance – or reassert an old one – more prisons – and politicians will seize on it as The Answer. Then its shortcomings start to show up and we settle back into the old, fatalistic assumptions that crime is inevitable, intractable, and getting worse all the time.

Only four per cent of people in our poll thought crime levels had gone down in the past 10 years, although this is precisely what has happened – if (and it's a big if) you trust the statistics. There are two accepted ways of measuring crime in this country: through police figures, which reflect recorded crimes, and through the British Crime Survey, which questions people in England and Wales about their experiences as victims. Crime is by definition an illicit event, and neither system is entirely reliable. Different police forces use different means of measurement: a youth smashing milk bottles on 12 different doorsteps might be recorded as one incident of minor vandalism by one force, but 12 incidents of serious criminal damage by another. According to Home Office research, out of every 100 crimes, only 50 will be reported, and around 33 recorded. A study carried out in the A&E department of Southampton General Infirmary concluded that this was equally true for violent crime: the majority of injuries consistent with violent assault had not been reported to the police, and there was no correlation between reporting and the severity of injuries sustained.

The British Crime Survey probably offers a more reliable measurement of some crimes, such as theft (there's not much point in reporting your stolen bicycle to the police if it's not insured), but not of, say, sexual assault, about which you might not want to talk to a researcher. Our poll, suggesting that 42 per cent of rapes have never been reported, confirms other research.

Yet both sets of figures show a decline of around 17 per cent in criminal activity since the mid 1990s. So why does everybody think we live in such a lawless world? The first reason is that an entire industry exists to sell us the threat of crime: insurance companies, burglar alarm businesses, the police, the criminal justice system, politicians, the media. They can usually find something in the statistics to gloss for their benefit: media coverage of a recent report that the number of crimes known to the police had fallen by one-fifth since 1992 focused on the fact that, nevertheless, street robberies had risen. Street robberies accounted for 2 per cent of crimes, and mainly involved kids nicking other kids' mobile phones. The nature of the crimes was glossed over as well. Meanwhile, murder, the rarest of crimes, is the one most often featured in fiction and real-life reconstructions.

The second reason for the persistent alarm is that the recent good news may simply be a blip. (There was a similar one in the 1950s, and there are signs that this one may be tailing off.) Since the end of the First World War, crime has risen steadily, pretty much in line with growing prosperity. Professor Gloria Laycock of the Jill Dando Institute says crime is not the result of poverty but of affluence. She resists the idea that crime can be blamed on education – even the worst educated children are at school longer than the average child in the early twentieth century. Nor is there any evidence that 'parenting' has declined seriously over the period, or that the population has grown proportionately. Her explanation is simply that 'in a capitalist society, there are a zillion things to pinch'.

While the volume, and certainly the nature, of crime may be determined by our circumstances, criminal activity has always been with us. All societies have struggled to balance drives and restraints. Seven of the 10 Commandments were prohibitions. We inherit both the tradition of the Sophists, of Hobbes, St Augustine and Machiavelli, which holds that people are essentially selfish and need to be restrained by laws and punishments; and that of Plato and Rousseau, which sees people as essentially benevolent, and society as the source of evil.

At some level, we may even quite like crime, because we need goodies and baddies to construct a narrative of ourselves. And however uncomfortable crime is, it's better than war, which is what breaks out when people commit crimes in tribal societies. So we have an apparently insatiable appetite for cop dramas, with their many sub-genres (forensics, corruption in the force, psychological profiling, Helen Mirren), as well as for true-life reconstructions, such as Crimewatch and its ilk. (Even posh BBC4 is in on the act with Art Crime -'the police track down a Rubens'.) Our attitudes to fictionalised crime are complex: we avidly consume both the hard-edged, ironic glamour of Tarantino and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, and the affectionately observed small time grubbiness of Only Fools and Horses. Julianne Moore, who played Clarice Starling in the third Hannibal Lecter film, describes her adversary in terms that wouldn't disgrace a Mills & Boon hero: 'He's civilised and interesting and intelligent, but there are no rules that govern him. He is the deepest, darkest place we can go.'

Our fascination with crime, and the range of responses to it in fiction (and even in real life: the Great Train Robbers were widely regarded as heroes) is proof of its heterogeneity. One problem with debates about crime is that it is invariably treated as though it were one thing, instead of many different things with varied causes, consequences and possible methods of prevention. It is easy to assume that the sort of crime that is rising over the long term is the stuff that hits the headlines: the crimes that chill us, that seem to betray the fracturing of the bonds of society: Dunblane and the murders of James Bulger, Sarah Payne, Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman. From here it's a small step to thinking, as many in our poll did, that we ought to arm ourselves with guns.

The truth is that one-third of men will have a criminal conviction by the time they are 46. Half will be convicted only once, for minor offences, and more than half will have a criminal career lasting less than one year. And these are the ones who are caught. It might almost be said that inclination to commit crimes is a natural part of growing up, especially for boys. In a European survey of 14- to 21-year-olds, two-thirds of British youths admitted to some form of delinquency, and this was the lowest for the five countries surveyed: in Switzerland, it was 90 per cent. (How exactly are you supposed to be tough on testosterone?) These young men are bad for the crime figures, and a real nuisance, but they aren't something to arm ourselves against.

Nick Ross of TV's Crimewatch, who is writing a book about crime, points out that most of us would be appalled by a burglar who breaks into a hospital and steals £100 from petty cash. But if a builder offered to do £5,000 of work without passing on his VAT or tax for cash, we might be more equivocal, although the results to the NHS would be similar. Our views of crime fluctuate, not necessarily rationally, but depending at least in part on what we think we can get away with, and what we imagine people around us are doing. (There is, in psychology, something called the fundamental attribution error, a theory that when interpreting other people's behaviour we make the mistake of overestimating character traits and underestimating situation and context. When it comes to our own feelings, it's the other way around. We are, in other words, inclined to take a harsher view of other people's backsliding.)

A growing understanding of the prevalence of opportunistic crime has led to a new approach to prevention, which accepts the limits of social policy and the courts to do much about current offending levels, and looks instead to reducing opportunity. Ross argues that the criminal justice system currently concentrates too much on blame, and that if we really wanted to reduce crime we would think differently - not imprisoning women who kill their abusive husbands, where there is no history or prospect of reoffending, but locking up persistent rapists who have emerged from prison only to rape again. He suggests that tackling crime should be more like airline accident investigations, where it is actually forbidden to assign blame, because that is thought to get in the way of ensuring the accident is not allowed to happen again.

There are all sorts of ways to restrict opportunity. These might include measures as simple as having photographs on credit cards (in Sweden, this reduced fraudulent use to 15 per cent of its former level) or restaurant chairs that incorporate somewhere safe to put your handbag. Section 17 of the Crime and Disorder Act of 1998 stipulates that local authorities must take into account the implications for crime of any decisions they make, acknowledging, in effect, that crime is largely a consequence of the way we organise our lives. Unfortunately the requirement does not extend to central Government.

Crime may best be understood by analogy with evolutionary ecology. In the same way that microbes are engaged in a constant tussle with immune systems, and predators with their prey, criminals are locked into a cycle of creativity that is then thwarted, or prohibitions that are then skirted around. It was ever thus: shortly after the Greeks introduced silver coinage in 600BC, someone produced a silver-plated bronze forgery. Car thieves will rent a new model to explore its vulnerabilities. In a complex process resembling spying and counter-espionage, security systems can be 'turned', so that pickpockets can watch people patting their wallets as they pass a 'Beware: pickpockets' poster.

According to Paul Ekblom of the Home Office's Research Development and Statistics Directorate, who is responsible for developing much of this thinking, 'an equilibrium can be approached in which a certain level of crime is the lowest that preventers can achieve, when set against increasing costs and other requirements such as freedom and privacy, and the highest that offenders can achieve, when set against risk and effort'. But the equilibrium is only ever brief. New targets for crime are constantly appearing, such as the mobile phone, new lifestyles mean that homes are left empty all day, and new attractive criminal environments arise, such as the queues for ATMs.

The challenge is to keep up with the adaptive criminal, and in the past we haven't been good at that. Policing has been largely reactive, concerned with catching criminals after they have committed crimes (difficult to do: it's estimated from insurance claims that for every 150 shoplifting incidents, only one is reported to the police). If we are serious about combating crime, it is probable that more policing needs to resemble anti-terrorism operations, where the high risk of letting the crime actually take place means prevention is crucial. Our poll, supporting CCTV and similar deterrents, suggests there would be a widespread public tolerance for this approach.

There is, however, a drawback with this. The advocates of designing crime out of existence like to draw a parallel with the unexpected 40 per cent decline in suicides between 1963 and 1975, which is understood to be due to the phasing out of carbon monoxide from British gas. Many suicidal people did not, it seems, seek another method when their first was thwarted. If such a momentous decision as whether to live or die could be affected by opportunity, so might the decision whether to commit crime. Unfortunately, we know there is a small proportion of career criminals who are so desperate, alienated, excluded, or simply bad – choose your theory – that they will do their damnedest to commit crime, no matter how hard we make it. Just as management theory posits that 80 per cent of the work in any organisation is done by 20 per cent of the people, an awful lot of crime is accounted for by a tiny minority.

If first-time offenders can make it through to their twenty-fourth birthday or the birth of their first child without committing further crimes, they're statistically likely to go straight for the rest of their lives. If they have offended for five years by the age of 25, they have on average five more years of criminal activity left. If they are still offending past 30, they have another seven years on average: in other words, there is, with age, a diminishing pool of hardened, serious offenders. We can't know, for all the reasons already covered, how much crime these determined criminals are committing, but it is widely believed that 10 per cent of offenders are responsible for 50 per cent of crime.

We know a lot about these people. They tend to have criminal parents, to live in cold or discordant families, to reside in poor and disorderly communities. Those who end up in prison are more likely than the rest of us to have grown up in care, to have been excluded from school and to have used drugs. (The Home Office estimates that one-third of crime related to theft is linked to the purchase of heroin and cocaine.) Some 65 per cent cannot read, and 85 per cent cannot write and spell to the level of an 11-year-old.

Clearly, a decent society should intervene as much as possible in these children's lives, for reasons of equity as much as for our stability and comfort. The Government would argue that it is making some moves in this direction, particularly with Sure Start. But there's no simple correlation – put x-million pounds into such-and-such an initiative and eradicate crime. (At least one study has found a link between availability of abortion and lower crime rates, which makes sense when you start thinking about it; but where does that get us?) Not all disadvantaged children will become criminals, and it's not easy to sort out what makes the difference. And there is a parallel problem for those who would argue for a genetic predisposition to criminality: even if, say, a gene for aggression does play a part, it could lead one individual to become a thug and another an officer in the SAS. Understanding the bell-curve distribution of criminality has had one important consequence, though: it leads to a different kind of policing, targeting criminals rather than the crime. Sometimes inelegantly known as problem-oriented policing, this is rumoured to have been the burden of Lord Birt's unpublished consultancy last year. It involves mapping crime hotspots, geographically, temporally and by the kind of crime, so that resources can be targeted, and then assessing the results.

It also means not thinking about the offence so much as the offender. The reason Jack Straw took a hard line on squeegee merchants when he was Home Secretary is that one in six turned out to have outstanding records for robbery. Ken Pease of Huddersfield University looked at people who parked illegally in disabled bays in the city and found that one in five were of immediate interest to police - perhaps there was an outstanding warrant for their arrest, or the car didn't exist in the form it should (it was a Bentley registered as a Ford Escort), or it was stolen. Pease points out that burglars make as much money stealing from shops as they do from burglary, so it makes sense to take DNA from shoplifters. He doesn't see a civil liberties dilemma here. 'It's no different from having a criminal record, and if they have volunteered for conviction, what's the problem?'

This style of policing also recognises that there is a bell curve of victims. According to the British Crime Survey, four per cent of victims suffer 40 per cent of crime. By concentrating on them – putting in security measures as soon as someone is burgled, heavily policing the streets where they live – it should be possible not only to make them feel safer, but, in theory, to reduce crime.

But the fact remains that, as our poll shows, people do remain very fearful. Is this the fault of the media? Perhaps, but only in ways that, like any other cause of crime, are more complex than we like to think. There may be a coarsening of the atmosphere because of violence on screen, but even the studies that have managed to correlate crime levels with television violence suggest that, to make a difference, we would have to go back to the sort of programming that we had in 1945, because the biggest change was between then and 1974. The media is probably culpable for seeking to persuade us that we are failures without the latest cars, clothes and mobile phones; and the young, who are most impressionable, also have the least money. As for statistics that show tabloid readers are more afraid of crime than those who take broadsheets, it may partly reflect reality. The rich, despite some US-style moves towards gated communities, are not particularly at risk. It is also the case that those who are most afraid of crime are usually those, such as the elderly, who have most to lose.

There is one other, linked, fashionable policing initiative - although at first sight it appears to be the opposite of targeted policing. Many forces are reintroducing the bobby on the beat. Officers resisted this for years, partly because it didn't fit the Starsky and Hutch footage they had running in their heads, partly because statistics showed it had little effect on catching criminals. But, increasingly, it has been demonstrated that people feel safer when they see a foot patrol. Most 999 calls are actually to do with what the police call quality of life crimes (and the Government, whose White Paper on the issue comes out this month, calls anti-social behaviour): noisy neighbours, loitering teenagers.

The enthusiasm for bobbies on the beat derives from the 'broken windows' idea of crime, which proposes that a place not visibly cared for becomes vulnerable. James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling, its chief proponents, evaluated a foot patrol experiment in Washington DC and concluded that it had 'not reduced crime rates. But residents of foot-patrolled neighbourhoods seemed to feel more secure than persons in other areas, tended to believe that crime had been reduced, and seemed to take fewer steps to protect themselves from crime (staying at home with doors locked).' They also had a better opinion of the police, whose morale was higher.

As mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani, with his police chief Bill Bratton, famously adopted the broken windows approach. By 2001 there were 641 murders in the city, excluding those of 9/11, down 70 per cent from 2,262 in 1990. But as the New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell points out in his book The Tipping Point, it wasn't simply zero tolerance, or Bratton, or Compstat (computer-generated statistics enabling more problem-oriented policing), or the collapse of the crack cocaine market, or the growing US economy, or the ageing population that made the difference. It was all of them. Crime is an epidemic, and epidemiology teaches us that the causes of such outbreaks are likely to be multiple and obscure. They can be defeated, if you can find the tipping point, but – not least in a society of stark and manifold inequalities – there are no easy answers.

By Geraldine Bedell
29 April 2003

http://observer.co.uk/crime/_story/0,13260,942085,00.html

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