Blog

Media report falling crime shocker

3 Feb 2010

Persuading the public not to live in fear of crime is never easy. When we have done research with local communities, fear of crime often rises even when recorded crime is falling sharply.

Yet fear of crime can be very damaging to the lives of many communities. Generations view each other with mutual mistrust. People retreat to their homes. The collective confidence of communities suffers.

The media is often blamed for sensationalising the isolated incident in a way which outweighs any raft of statistics. This should be no surprise. Even the most analytical individual will respond more to a single compelling story of violence than pages of data which show that there is no need to panic.

So getting across the message that crime is down, by 36% since 1997 according to the British Crime Survey, is well nigh impossible - at least in the more popular media. Or is it? How then is today's Daily Mail running a story highlighting falling crime figures?

This is all because Shadow Home secretary Chris Grayling came up with this cunning plan to boost community cohesion and reduce fear of crime by issuing statistics, which appeared to show crime rising, but were fatally flawed. The sets of statistics he used  were collected on the basis of entirely different criteria.

He knew this of course, but banked on the media realising that the one story that trumps 'rising crime' is politicians making a hash of it by getting their figures wrong. So the Conservatives selflessly allowed themsleves be drawn into a BBC trap in order to ensure that the media, for the first time in living memory, is reporting a fall in crime. This is something that well-planned proactive campaigns have often failed to achieve.

All they need to do now is to take the credit and explain that this how they planned it all along. A contender for a PR award surely?

Ian Coldwell