The latest British Crime Survey/police recorded crime data shows another fall in the number of crimes committed and in the risk of victimisation.
This is starting to get a bit spooky. The government certainly can't cope with it, since the latest figures relate to the time when Labour were still in power. So the ConDems are reduced to saying, essentially, that this is the wrong type of crime and if we looked at the sort people are really concerned about, um this might be going down as well, but it's still going up too, dammit! And anyway we don't count it properly. Or something.
Political denial aside, the continued reduction in both recorded crime and the crime reported in the BCS is posing some really interesting questions for criminologists. Most academic criminologists, as far as I'm aware, buy into two key narratives. First, most crime is about/caused by deprivation (relative and absolute), inequality, and other socio-economic 'bads'. Second, police numbers, initiatives, crime prevention measures, and particularly imprisonment can have only relatively minor effects on crime, mainly because of point one. These are certainly my own default positions.
Yet the continuing reduction in crime has occurred over a period in which socio-economic bads were not dealt with in any meaningful way (the latest figures are even post-banking crisis). Inequality, certainly, has probably increased over recent years. And the reduction has occurred at a time of increasing police numbers and record levels of imprisonment.
So what is going on here? How do we deal with these contradictions? Are they contradictions? Are we just plain wrong? I very much doubt it, as it happens. When you look into it properly, the numbers simply don't stack up to support the idea that police numbers/imprisonment can have major effects on the general level or rate of crime (for a whole range of reasons, not least because so few 'crimes' ever make it to court) - although in certain limited circumstances they definitely can.
So what is the story?
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At the risk of sounding ridicolous or like this wasn't a vaguely seriously meant suggestion - perhaps crime went out of fashion, a kind of generational effect. I know that is hard to belief for sociologists who think deviance (and in the well known forms of stealing, violence against strangers -- men are still beating/raping their wifes and exgirlfriends, that didn't go down) is a constant in society that doesn't undergo change and doesn't know fashion like just everything else.
ReplyDeleteI agree, I think.
ReplyDeleteThere are some complicating factors: that crime has gone down in almost all developed countries counts against the idea that it's all about more police and more prisons, because crime decreased in countries that had neither as well as in those which had both; but it's also then hard to ascribe the decline to fashion unlesss it's a world-wide fashion.
But in general, yes, I personally think this might have something to do with it. We know a lot of crime is about habit. People get used to doing things in a certain way, and perhaps people's habits have changed over recent years as a result of changes in 'fashion' (which drugs to use, the internet changing the way personal relationships are managed and making everything more 'public' among the age groups most prone to crime etc).