One thing that it often said by those who wish to argue that crime has not really increased is that crime used not to be recorded whereas now, by implication, it is.

The latter is certainly not true. There have probably been some serious academic attempts to measure how big the under-reporting of crime has been at various times. However it seems clear that a great deal of crime is now not reported. Here is a little anecdotal evidence taken from an entry from the Times Educational Supplement "opinion staffroom" today:

It's really the stuff that I know goes unreported which annoys me more, as I said at the beginning. I'm sure nobody bothered calling the police about the people who pulled the door off our communal bin room the other week, or those who ripped up a duvet and left the bits scattered all over our communal lawn this week, or those who dumped the contents of a wheelie bin in the middle of the road last week, or left a supermarket trolley and large metal cage at the bottom of the steps last week, or those who continue to smoke in communal areas in our apartment block, or the idiot in the block shouting racial abuse out of the window at some foreigners in the street last night, or those who disturb everyone by shouting as they come home from a drunken night out (pretty much every night). And we did call the police twice in the last few weeks at 3am because we heard violent attacks on our neighbours. That's just in the last couple of weeks. Every morning on my walk to the bus stop I see some evidence of the behaviour of the night before.

Most are things which would be considered minor crimes (vandalism, antisocial behaviour, smoking in a public place, racial abuse, stealing property etc etc) but the police are hardly going to take you seriously if you ring up about a shredded duvet on your lawn. It's just annoying, mindless behaviour.

Oh, and we live in a "nice", residential cul de sac of reasonably expensive, new apartments.

The site can be accessed here.

It might be worth repeating a quotation I cited in The Welfare State We're In from Professor Jose Harris:

A very high proportion of Edwardian convicts were in prison for offences that would have been much more lightly treated or wholly disregarded by law enforcers in the late twentieth century. In 1912-13, for example, one quarter of males aged 16 to 21 who were imprisoned in the metropolitan area of London were serving seven-day sentences for offences which included drunkenness, 'playing games in the street', riding a bicylcle without lights, gaming, obscene language and sleeping rough. If late twentieth century standards of policing and sentencing had been applied in Edwardian Britain, the prisons would have been virtually empty: conversely, if Edwardian standards were applied in the 1990s then most of the youth of Britain would be in gaol.

This is from a footnote in the book Private Lives, Public Spirit: A Social History of Britain 1870-1914.

In my own book, I cite much other evidence to suggest that crime has become a great deal worse than in previous decades. The rise in recorded crime, let alone unrecorded crime, is astonishing. Between 1898 and 1998/99, recorded violent crime multiplied seventy-seven times. The numbers went from 4,221 to 331,843. The graph (printed in the book) shows that rise was continuous and remorseless. To believe that this was all due to changed standards of reporting, you would also have to believe that there was a continuous, unbroken change, year by year, in the standards of reporting. It is not credible. Nor, I believe, is there evidence for any such thing.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Behaviour & Crime

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