Crime and fear

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 07/02/2011 (5718 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

So how do you arrest public fear?

That’s the problem facing law enforcement officials and governments in many countries these days.

While overall crime rates — offences to people and property — remain stable or even have dropped somewhat, people believe they are at danger of being victimized.

Why’s that? Well, it would be easy to pin the blame on the media for inevitably focusing on the worst cases of the crimes.

Mike Gough, professor of criminal policy at Kings College, London, wrote recently in the Independent that “media portrayals of crime and justice do seem to be particularly perverse.

“News stories about soaring crime and judges who are soft on crime and soft in the head are good for circulation, but bad for justice — when the headlines bear so little relation to reality.”

We do agree that only the worst crimes get reported and the messiest of those are the ones that end up on our front page. It’s just the way the filter works at any media organization, the biggest or best in any category — be it in news, entertainment or sports — is what makes it through to the front page.

And on days when we feature a story or photo about a major crime on Page A1, we do generally sell more copies and are talked about more on the Internet and in the coffee shops.

But does that really fuel the public’s fear about crime?

Well, we don’t have a simple answer. But we do have an interesting local example of fear versus reality.

A short time ago, the Sun reported — on its front page — on crime statistics from last year. The story said the number of crimes reported last year was down overall but specific types of crimes, such as sex and weapon offences, jumped.

There was one homicide in 2010, that of Duane Lacquette whose body was found in his Centennial Boulevard home on Jan. 16, 2010. The only attempted murder charge last year stemmed from a gang-related stabbing on July 17. And both of those incidents received a fair amount of coverage in the pages of this paper.

Overall, however, violent crimes went up just two per cent to 766 reports from 749.

Property crimes went down nine per cent to 2,521 reports from 2,770.

The total reported crimes was down seven per cent to 4,268 from 4,574. Impaired driving dropped, too, by 23 per cent to 153 cases from 199.

But an online poll on brandonsun.com posted after the story ran asked the question: Do you feel that crime is up or down in Brandon? Well, 60 per cent of the votes indicated crime was increasing a little or a lot, while 29 per cent said it’s the same.

While that’s not a very scientific method of gauging public opinion, it does follow the puzzling national trend.